Laura Bialis, 35, combined several of her passions when she became a documentary filmmaker.
Those passions — a love of theater when she was growing up in Los Angeles, study and research of 20th century European history while a student at Stanford University and a fervor for cinema developed during an academic year in Italy — culminated in a decision to study for a graduate degree in filmmaking at the University of Southern California.
Now an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Bialis will bring her latest film, “Refusenik” to Milwaukee on March 15 and 16.
The first retrospective documentary to chronicle the 30-year movement to free the Jews of the former Soviet Union, “Refusenik” tells its compelling story mainly through first-person accounts Bialis gathered from ordinary people and world leaders in Russia, Israel and the U.S.
She fell upon the opportunity to make “Refusenik” while working with educators in Omaha, Neb., on a curriculum for her documentary “TAK FOR ALT: Survival of a Human Spirit” [“Thanks for Everything,” in Danish], about a Holocaust survivor who worked against racism in the U.S.
Some members of Omaha’s Jewish community who viewed “TAK FOR ALT” approached Bialis about a local woman, Shirley Goldstein, who had been an activist on behalf of Soviet Jewry. They urged Bialis to film her story.
Though she hadn’t studied about refuseniks in college, she had studied about other dissidents under communism in Eastern Europe, Bialis said in a telephone interview from Sderot, Israel, where she now lives. And this subject fit well with her background and interests.
When she started doing interviews for a trailer, she “got totally hooked” and realized that this was an “unbelievable, unbelievable story that nobody had told, that was just waiting for me to tell it,” Bialis said.
Bialis spent five years working on “Refusenik” and her work interviewing its subjects changed her understanding of what is possible and what is necessary in the face of injustice.
“When you spend five years trying to tell the story of these unbelievably heroic people, both the refuseniks and the activists [who took up their cause outside of the Soviet Union], who said they were angry about the way things were and who decided they would change [them], it’s very hard to just sit on your duff when something comes up.”
Making “Refusenik” turned out to be a life-changing experience for Bialis. She was no longer able to get upset about something that was happening and not do anything about it. And that change in her, has shaped her life in a dramatic way.
She woke up one morning in Los Angeles in May 2007 with an inbox full of e-mail messages from friends in Israel. These messages told of the bombing of Sderot by Hamas from Gaza, but she was unable to find anything about it in any American newspapers.
“I was just totally shocked that this huge crisis didn’t make it into the American newspapers. And I waited and waited and by the end of the week there was an article that just said ‘IDF Kills Five in Gaza’ and it didn’t give any context.”
This changed the way Bialis saw the world, she said. “I realized, ‘Wow, what do I not know?’ When I read the newspaper, what pieces of information are excluded that I would need to make an appropriate judgment call about everything that’s headlined.”
She decided that if no one else was going to tell this story, she would have to take her camera and go do it herself.
Bialis started making a film in July 2007 and decided that to be able to tell the story of Sderot, she would need to live there and experience the terrorist bombings first hand. She moved there in December 2007 after completing “Refusenik.”
Discovering that Sderot is a center of popular Israeli music, she decided to film Sderot through the lens of the city’s musicians.
In the process of doing that, Bialis fell in love with and married one of her subjects, an Israeli Jew whose family came from Morroco, and has since emigrated to Sderot.
“Refusenik” will be shown at the Marcus North Shore Theater, 11700 N. Port Washington Rd. in Mequon, on Sunday, March 15 at 7 p.m. The screening will be followed by a talkback with Bialis.
Admission is $6. To reserve a seat and purchase a ticket, visit www.jewishmilwaukee.com and click on March 15 or call Micki Seinfeld at 414-967-8325. Tickets will also be available at the door as space allows.
The screening is sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. The Helen Bader Foundation funded Bialis’ visit.
The Jewish Museum Milwaukee will also show “Refusenik” on Monday, March 16 at 1 p.m. At 7 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel, Bialis will talk about life in Sderot and her next film “Sderot: Rock in the Red Zone,” for which she will show a trailer.
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