• Title:
• Work in Progress: Scapegoat on Trial

• Director:
• Josh Waletzky

• English

• USA, unknown

• Venue:
• Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater

• Purchase Tickets:
• Show 1  

Scapegoat On Trial co-directed by Albert Maysles and Josh Waletzky investigates how irrationality can seize control of society when political leaders spin a powerful story. Cynically concocted by the tsarist secret police, the Beilis Affair brings alive an urgent warning about how governments can demonize vulnerable groups to stoke our fear and produce genocidal campaigns (as in the Third Reich, Yugoslavia and Rwanda ).
 
Albert Maysles has been called “dean of documentary filmmakers.” Along with his late brother David, the Maysles are recognized as pioneers of “direct cinema,” which revolutionized American filmmaking by creating non-fiction feature films in which the drama of life unfolded without scripts, sets or narration. The highlights of his long career include Primary (1960), Salesman (1968) and Gimme Shelter (1970), the Academy Award-nominated Christo’s Valley Curtains (1974), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the HotDocs Film Festival in Toronto.
 
Josh Waletzky is a distinguished documentary filmmaker and musician, whose work has often involved Jewish subjects. The masterful soundtracks he designed for his landmark documentary features Image Before My Eyes (1980) and Partisans of Vilna (1986) helped bring Yiddish-klezmer music to a new, worldwide audience, as did the prize-winning PBS special for which he directed the editing, Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler's House.  His other credits include: Dashiell Hammett: Detective. Writer (1999) and Shaker Heights : The Struggle For Integration (1998).
Moderated by Aviva Kempner, co-founder of the Washington Jewish Film Festival ; director of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Today I Vote For My Joey and Gertrude Berg: America’s Molly Goldberg; and producer of The Partisans of Vilna.

• Purchase Tickets:
• Show 1