The Filmmakers
Irene Lilienheim Angelico – Director, Producer, Writer
Irene Lilienheim Angelico is the winner of numerous international awards for directing and producing, as well as a Gemini for best writing in a documentary. Her work was included in The Fifty Greatest Documentaries of all Times at the international Salute to the Documentary, and selected for retrospectives in London and France.
In 1980, Angelico and her partner Abbey Neidik produced and directed Dark Lullabies about the effects of the Holocaust on the next generation of Germans and Jews. This highly regarded film has garnered many prestigious international prizes, and continues to be shown in special screenings including the inaugural film at the Stratford Festival Forum, the Berlin Arsenal 70th anniversary of the Holocaust and the Inconvenient Films: International Human Rights Festival.
Angelico went on to direct and write award-winning series including The Cola Conquest, about Coca-Cola as a metaphor for America; Black Coffee, about the history and social impact of coffee and Inside the Great Magazines, about the first international media.
Angelico also produced and wrote many successful documentaries including Entre Solitudes; The Love Prophet and the Children of God; She Got Game; Vendetta Song; Canadaville, USA; and Unbreakable Minds, a poignant film that aims to humanize mental illness.
Currently, Angelico is in distribution with Shekinah: the Intimate Lives of Hasidic Women, and most recently Beyond Earth: the Beginning of NewSpace, named by Realscreen as a MipCom Pic for 2017.
Angelico is in production with Reaching for Zion, about the untold story of the relationship of Rastafari and Jews, featuring Bob Marley’s granddaughter Donisha Prendergast and just releasing Shekinah Rising, a sequel about young Hasidic women.
Angelico has also been involved in the publication of several articles and two books. With Abbey Neidik and Mark Pendergrast, she edited The Aftermath: A Survivor’s Odyssey Through War-Torn Europe, written by her father, Henry Lilienheim, and endorsed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Elie Wiesel and the Dalai Lama. She and Yehudi Lindeman co-edited The Third Seder: A Haggadah for Yom HaShoah, which includes new rituals they created uniquely for the commemoration of Yom HaShoah.
Angelico is currently directing and producing (with Abbey Neidik) The First to Stand, a documentary featuring the work of Irwin Cotler and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
Abbey Neidik – Producer, Camera
Abbey Neidik is an established director and producer with an oeuvre of over seventy films, including two Academy Award nominees.
In 1980 Neidik and his partner Irene Angelico formed DLI Productions. Together they produced and directed Dark Lullabies / Berceuses Sombres, which has been shown around the world and won numerous first prizes and prestigious awards. The film was included in The Fifty Greatest Documentaries of all Times at the international Salute to the Documentary, and selected to represent the best of the NFB at retrospectives in London and France. Thirty years later, Dark Lullabies continues to be shown in screenings worldwide including the inaugural film at the Stratford Festival Forum, the Berlin Arsenal 70th anniversary of the Holocaust and the Inconvenient Films: International Human Rights Festival. It recently played at Montreal’s Cinema du Parc for over a week to full houses.
Next Neidik directed Between The Solitudes / Entre Solitudes, which was nominated for two Gemeaux Awards for Best Documentary and Best Editing. This was followed by two highly successful DLI features. The Love Prophet and the Children of God is an inside look at one of today’s most controversial religious cults and was awarded a Gold Plaque in Chicago. The Cola Conquest, produced by Neidik and directed by Angelico, is a three-part documentary special that garnered Best Documentary Series by an Independent at the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto, a Silver Hugo in Chicago, a Gold Apple in San Francisco, a Gemini nomination for Best Documentary Series and a Gemini Award for Best Writing in a Documentary or Series.
Neidik co-produced and directed The Journey Home: A Romanian Adoption, a tender and emotional film about Romanian orphans a decade after the fall of Ceausescu, and co-produced and co-directed She Got Game: Coming of Age on the WTA Tour, a unique, behind-the-scenes look at women’s tennis that has already received four international awards; Vendetta Song, which examines the tradition of honour killings within rural Kurdish tribes in Turkey; directed Unbreakable Minds, a poignant film that aims to de-stigmatize and humanize mental illness; co-produced and co-directed (with Angelico) Inside the Great Magazines, a three-part special about the inner workings of the magazine industry and the people who create them; and directed Canadaville, USA, about billionaire Frank Stronach’s bold social experiment in rural Louisiana. Shot over two years, the film enters the lives of a group of Hurricane Katrina evacuees as they struggle to rebuild and break out of the cycle of poverty.
More recently, Neidk is co-produced and directed Beyond Earth: the Beginning of NewSpace, named by Realscreen as a MipCom Pic for 2017 and Big Wind, about the effects of industrial wind turbines.
Neidik’s latest production Shekinah Rising is a follow-up to Shekinah: the Intimate Lives of Hasidic Women. Both give an unprecedented look into the rarefied world of Hasidic women. Shekinah Rising will be released in the spring of 2019.
Neidik is currently directing, producing (with Angelico) and doing camera on The First to Stand, a documentary featuring the work of Irwin Cotler and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
Maurie Alioff – Associate Producer, Writer
Maurie Alioff has written for a variety of documentary and fiction film projects and is a film and television journalist. He was the Montreal editor of Cinema Canada and a contributing editor and film columnist for Matrix, another nationally distributed journal. He wrote for the Film and Television magazine, Take One and a monthly column for ETR covering the Television Industry. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the European documentary magazine Dox, the Cannes Market Daily, and Canadian Cinematographer.
Currently, Maurie Alioff writes for several publications including the documentary film magazine, POV. Online, he is a contributing editor for northernstars.ca, for which he writes the column Inside Quebec, and for the online magazine, Salon.ll. He has written numerous extended profiles and reviews about Québécois, Canadian, and international actors, directors, and producers, and has covered the Toronto International Film Festivals, the Banff Television Festival, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, the FanTasia I Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, as well as other international events. He has appeared on Canadian radio and TV broadcasts including the two-hour CBC documentary history of Canadian film, Popcorn & Maple Syrup.
Martin Nault – Editor
Martin Nault, with over seven years experience as an editor and more than fifteen years in the domain of postproduction, has an impressive list of feature films in 35mm and IMAX, documentaires including Reaching for Zion, Shekinah Rising, Beyond Earth: the Beginning of NewSpace, Search for God and Big Wind; and television séries, fiction films and animation including Only in Montreal, Les Cracks du Lab, Madlabs, and Dogs with Jobs.
Henri Oppenheim –original music
A defrocked mathematician, Henri Oppenheim grew up in Paris and studied composition and orchestration at McGill University in Montreal. He was the accordionist and director of the Montreal klezmer ensemble Kleztory for many years (Opus Prize 2007), producing concerts on 4 continents. In 2008, he founded Magillah, an ensemble dedicated to vocal Yiddish music, which Le Devoir described as “spectacular, celebratory, joyous and packed with emotion”.
Oppenheim’s project, “Tur Malka”, is a song cycle based on 20th Century Yiddish poetry from Montreal, transposes the rich musical traditions of the Old World into the new. Henri is a part time music-therapist at the Montreal General Jewish Hospital, and gives seminars about Klezmer and Yiddish music. Most recently, he did the original music for Shekinah Rising.
Toben Neidik – Sound
Toben Neidik is a rap singer, artist, film student, and soundman. His work is on display at the Montreal’s Children’s Hospital and has been exhibited in the Grand Chalet on Mont Royal. He has done camera on several music videos and sound and additional camera on documentaries including Reaching for Zion; Search for God, and Unbreakable Minds; and sound on Beyond Earth, the Beginning of NewSpace, Shekinah Rising and Elmyr.
Toben is currently doing sound and additional camera on The First to Stand, a documentary featuring the work of Irwin Cotler and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights
