Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire

As perhaps the world’s most eloquent witness to the Holocaust, writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s legacy would seem to be firmly attached to the singular horror that he both experienced and spent his life memorializing—the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. But this poetic and powerful documentary reveals that Wiesel’s astounding moral clarity and his outspokenness against the indifference that humans can display to suffering are deeply resonant in our own time. Wiesel’s clarion call to remember the victims and to resist hate wherever it appears feels not a matter of history, but urgent today. Part chronological biography—reconstructing crucial episodes from Wiesel’s private and public life, including his rebuke of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to a cemetery where SS soldiers were buried—the film is also a moving evocation of Wiesel’s dawning consciousness of his calling, as he wrestled with both the gift and the burden of being humanity’s witness. Wiesel’s story is told largely in his own words and testimony, and is hauntingly illustrated by Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animations. —Peter Stein, Jewish Film Institute