Q&A with director Oren Rudavsky moderated by Variety writer Addie Morfoot

Saturday, Sep. 6 2025, 1:30

• Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts grants. Rudavsky produced, directed, and co-wrote the NEH-funded American Masters documentary Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, which was nominated for a Critics Choice award. His film 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 2018. His NEH-funded film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and broadcast on PBS in 1997, and his ITVS-funded film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and was chosen for the PBS POV series. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the forty permanent film installations at the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2013. 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, Oren completed The Treatment, his fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm, and Famke Janssen, which was awarded Best Film Made in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH-funded film Everything Seemed Possible, alongside director and editor Ramón Rivera Moret, about an era of profound cultural and social change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s-1960s.
• Addie Morfoot has been covering the entertainment industry for the last 18 years. She currently serves as head of editorial coverage for Variety's Docs section. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, Crain's New York Business, Documentary Magazine, and Adweek. Her personal essays have been published in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Salon, Cosmopolitan.com, Brain, Child, The LA Times, and The New York Press.

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