Whether hidden for months or years, the experience affected both the hidden children and their rescuers profoundly.
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Aviva Slesin
Academy Award winner Aviva Slesin's new documentary film, SECRET LIVES: Hidden Children & their Rescuers During WW II, tells the complex and emotional story of a small number of Jewish children who were saved from the Nazis by non-Jews who, at great perso
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Whether hidden for months or years, the experience affected both the hidden children and their rescuers profoundly and forever and is the focus of a new documentary produced, directed and narrated by Aviva Slesin, herself a former hidden child. Aviva was born in Lithuania, and was hidden as a baby by a Lithuanian family during World War II.Aviva Slesin has worked in film for 28 years, first as a film editor and then as a producer/director of award-winning documentaries. She won an Academy Award for The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table, and has also produced and directed many other documentaries that have all aired on PBS, TBS, or HBO.
Ms. Slesin’s career was launched in 1975 as a freelance film editor with A China Memoir: the Other Half of the Sky, produced by Shirley MacLaine and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Next she edited Making Television Dance, Making Television Dance about choreographer Twyla Tharp-followed in 1977 by The Ruttles, a Beatles satire directed by Monty Python’s Eric Idle.
In 1980 Ms. Slesin made the transition to independent producing and directing with nine comedy shorts for the original Saturday Night Live, one of which – “Singing Dogs” with Bill Murray – was featured at that year’s New York Film Festival. She directed and edited Directed by William Wyler, a biography of the late Hollywood director which aired on PBS on American Masters and was shown at the London, Venice, Sundance and New York Film Festivals in 1986.
In 1988 Ms. Slesin won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary for her film The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table.
1990 marked a shift to dramatic films when she directed and executive produced Stood Up!, an ABC After School Special. Voices in Celebration, a documentary on the National Gallery’s fiftieth anniversary, appeared next; during 1993/94 Ms. Slesin produced and directed the documentary Hot on the Trail: Sex, Love and Romance in the Old West for TBS.
Since 1995, Ms. Slesin produced and directed short segments for the Rosie O’Donnell show; Kids Talk; a series of fourteen shorts for Edgewise with John Hockenberry, nine segments for HBO’s Real Sex series and six pieces for Religion and Ethics News Weekly.
Ms. Slesin has been a MacDowell Fellow, has lectured at various universities and has had a retrospective of her work at the Sundance Film Festival. She is a member of the Directors Guild and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ms. Slesin is President of Aviva Films.
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An Evening With Aviva Slesin
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Videos
The Ten-Year Lunch Wins Documentary Feature: 1988 Oscars
Hiding from the Holocaust (Jane Marks)
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