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Moriah Films is the Jack and Pearl Resnick Film Division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Our documentaries focus on the 3,500 year old Jewish experience as well as contemporary human rights and ethical issues.Moriah’s goal is to produce theatrical documentaries on a regular basis that both enlighten and educate while at the same time reach national and international audiences. Two of Moriahs’ films have been recipients of Academy Awards™ for Best Feature Documentary, Genocide (1981) and The Long Way Home (1997). |
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In-House Production Facility The Moriah Films’ Studio houses its own in-house production facility with state-of-the-art equipment. It is also the repository of the film and video archives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, totaling millions of feet of film and tens of thousands of hours of materials. |
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Narrators
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Many noted actors have narrated Moriah’s productions including the late Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Douglas, Sir Ben Kingsley, Nicole Kidman, Kevin Costner, Brooke Shields, Morgan Freeman, Anne Bancroft, Martin Landau, Richard Dreyfuss, Sean Astin, Michael York, Richard Dreyfuss, Patrick Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg, and Ed Asner. |
Moriah’s films have been screened theatrically and broadcast around the world on HBO, Showtime, Starz/Encore, Channel 4 in the UK, ORF in Austria, RAI in Italy, as well as on German, French, Russian, Chinese, and Israeli television outlets.
The Wiesenthal Center has had a strong interest in films since its inception and benefits from the ongoing advice and counsel of some of the leaders in the film industry who serve on its Board of Trustees.
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| Moriah: A Film Company Like No Other |
| The Simon Wiesenthal Center was a pioneer in creating Moriah Films whose purpose is to continue to produce quality, award-winning documentaries on the epic events of the 20th and 21st centuries – events that shaped and redefined modern Jewish history. In 1980, recognizing the impact of films, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Center’s Founder and Dean assembled a team that began working on a documentary on the Holocaust. That film, Genocide, narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles, was the first documentary on the Holocaust to win an Academy Award®. Rabbi Hier became the first Rabbi to both win an Oscar® and be invited to be a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Genocide launched what became the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s film division, Moriah Films. In 1997, Rabbi Hier and Richard Trank Writer/Director and executive producer of Moriah Films, won the Academy Award® for The Long Way Home, making it Rabbi Hier’s second Oscar®. Moriah has produced 16 documentary films to date. |
