Oren Rudavsky

Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rudavsky produced the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, broadcast date April, 2019. The film was chosen to premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Hot Springs Documentary Festival. He also recently produced Witness Theater a film chronicling a workshop between holocaust survivors and high-school students. His films Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016. Colliding Dreams was broadcast on PBS in May 2018. His film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and his film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the permanent installations at the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow which opened in 2013. In 2011, Rudavsky produced a series of profile documentaries for Bloomberg television called Risk Takers. In 2009 Rudavsky was Producer/Writer of the two part series Time for School 3, a twelve-year longitudinal study examining the education of seven children in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle. In 2006, he completed his first fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director: The Treatment, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen. The film premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival where it was awarded Best Film, Made in New York. Since that opening The Treatment played at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Athens Intl. Film Festival, the Australian Intl. Film Festival, the Hamptons Intl. Film Festival, Mill Valley, Austin, Maui, Williamstown, Newport and Munich. The Treatment recently was awarded First Prize, from the Gene Siskel Film Center for the Christopher Wetzel Independent Narrative Comedy Award. The Treatment opened at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the Angelika Film Center in New York in 2007. Oren's feature documentary Hiding and Seeking was nominated as best documentary in 2004 for an Independent Spirit Award, enjoyed a wide theatrical release and was selected for broadcast in 2005 on the acclaimed PBS series POV. It was also selected from hundreds of entries to represent the United States at the 2006 Input Conference in Taiwan. It won the Grand Prize at the Warsaw International Jewish Film Festival and was Best Film at the North American Interfaith film festival in 2004. In 1999, Rudavsky produced And Baby Makes Two. The program, funded by ITVS, was selected to be part of the PBS series Independent Lens, and was later broadcast on the Oxygen Network. . The National Endowment for the Humanities funded his 1997 film, A Life Apart: Hasidism in America. The film enjoyed a highly successful theatrical release, was on the short list for the Academy Awards best documentary and received an Emmy nomination for its national PBS release in 1998. Rudavsky's work includes writing and producing segments for the ABC national series PrimeTime Live, the PBS series Media Matters, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly and other national programming. He has also worked as a post-production supervisor on the film unit of Saturday Night Live and the syndicated series Tales From the Darkside in the 1980's. The subjects of Oren's films have ranged from mental illness to race relations and have featured the Amish, Jews in Eastern Europe, a Latino immigrant theater group in New York, Nuns, and Hasidim. Selected credits also include Spark Among the Ashes, a Sundance Film Festival Selection; At the Crossroads, Gloria: A Case of Alleged Police Brutality, Fire'scapes, A Film About My Home and Dreams So Real. His films have appeared on WNET, PBS, Discovery, and ABC television and been shown at Sundance, Berlin, AFI, San Francisco, Jerusalem, Sydney, London, and other film festivals. As director of photography Rudavsky's credits include the the aforementioned films: Hiding and Seeking, A Life Apart and And Baby Makes Two as well as the acclaimed PBS POV documentary Twitch and Shout, The Last Klezmer, an award winner at the Berlin International Film Festival; The Amish: Not to be Modern, Voices From the Attic, and Un Beso A Esta Tierra.