Pearl Gluck: Straddling Jewish Worlds Through Filmmaking

Exploring the value, ritual, and tradition of storytelling while straddling different Jewish worlds. Pearl Gluck’s work has been part of the Sundance Lab, played at the Cannes Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and PBS. The Turn Out is her first fiction feature film. Her first documentary feature film, Divan (2004) opened theatrically at Film Forum in NYC, was broadcast on the Sundance Channel and played across the country and internationally at festivals. Pearl’s first narrative short, Where is Joel Baum (2012), won prizes such as Best Actor at the Starz Denver Film Festival and Best Film at the Toronto Female Eye Film Festival. She continues to make both documentary and narrative films that explore themes of class, gender, and faith. Pearl teaches Screenwriting and Directing at Penn State University and is currently developing a documentary project exploring specialty courts that offer an alternative, treatment-oriented approach for victims of sex trafficking. Ten years after leaving her native Borough Park, Brooklyn, Pearl Gluck received a Fulbright grant to collect oral histories from Yiddish speakers in areas of Hungary once home to thriving Hasidic communities. At heart, she is a zamler, Yiddish for collector, an ethnographer. Gluck directed a one-hour TV documentary, Soundwalk: Williamsburg, (2007) broadcast on Paris Premiere, and the audio tour for Soundwalk which was nominated for a 2007 Audie Award. She is co-writer on Goyta (2007) which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as part of Cinefondation. Her first film, Divan (2004), is a Hasidic tale five years in the making which was developed in part at the Sundance Institute, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, opened theatrically at the Film Forum in NYC (2004) and broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Gluck continues to draw from her rich Hasidic heritage and through her current work seeks to provide both a bridge to the past and a form of cross-communal dialogue through the arts. Gluck co-directed the award-winning short, Great Balls of Fire (6 mins; 2001) which is a homeless man's response to September 11. The short continues to screen worldwide at venues such as Transmediale, Oberhausen, Walker Center for the Arts, New York Video Festival, and in competition at the Globalica 10th International Media Art Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland. Gluck has spearheaded community arts programs, curated literary and film events from Hungary to Israel to New York City, including an artist residency at the Paideia Institute in Stockholm. As part of her ongoing commitment to educational outreach, she has appeared on numerous college and university campuses, and acted as writer/mentor at the MacArthur-granted program, The Harlem Writers Crew. Her first involvement with documentary film was in A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (1998; Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum). Her appearance in the film has encouraged grass-roots organization for an ex-Orthodox creative alliance.