This event has passed.

Film Refusenik

  • Refusenik_event_full

A chronicle of the 30-year international movement to free Soviet Jews, Refusenik is old-school — full of talking heads, historical footage, and blissfully, very little voiceover. The film takes its name from the term for Jewish activists who publicly challenged the communist regime, but it could just as well describe producer/director Laura Bialis' rejection of the pyrotechnics often passing for documentaries. Instead, she slowly parses out the grassroots organization required to convince European countries, the former USSR, and the US to implement foreign policy that recognized the human-rights violations at hand. The result — the liberation of roughly 1.5 million Jews — speaks to the still-existing power of a people to change their government.

– Lisa Rosman