New Elie Wiesel Doc “Soul on Fire” Finished at Goldcrest

Soul on Fire is director Oren Rudavsky’s fascinating new documentary about Elie Wiesel, whose searing 1958 memoir Night introduced millions to the horrors of the Holocaust. Goldcrest Post provided color grading and finishing services for the film, which relates Wiesel’s life story from a new and intimate point of view, told mostly through his own words.

Produced with the cooperation of Wiesel’s family, Soul on Fire goes beyond the brilliant writer’s traumatic experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald to reveal his rich inner life. Among other things, it explores Wiesel’s fascination with Jewish mysticism, which he wrote about in his book Souls on Fire, the source of the film’s title. The film draws on archival media, interviews, audio recordings and more. The story is also enriched with animation sequences beautifully executed by Joel Orloff. “People know Elie Wiesel as a survivor, but he was also a dreamer,” says Rudavsky. “My film tells his dreams.”

Goldcrest Post’s Ken Sirulnick served as colorist for the film, a role that taxed both his technical and artistic skills. He was tasked with achieving visual consistency among media from diverse sources of varying quality and that dated back to the 1940s. He was also charged with supporting Rudavsky’s moving and insightful narrative with emotive color treatments.

“This project involved combining things from different sources, resolutions and frame rates, and making sure everything played correctly and looked good in a 4K format,” Sirulnick recalls. “It entailed up-resing, clean up and matching colors, while retaining the character of the original footage. There were a lot of hurdles.”

Sirulnick points to a sequence showing Wiesel chatting with Ronald Reagan prior to receiving a Congressional Gold Medal. “That scene included material from different sources of the same event,” he says. “Some were good quality newsfeeds; others were ripped from online media. We had to make it blend seamlessly.”

Rudavsky says Sirulnick’s experience was invaluable in determining how to integrate media of different quality without jarring the audience or taking them out of the moment. “There were a lot of decisions to make,” he observes. “Ken would sometimes say, we can clean this up, but we don’t want to make it too clean. We want to keep some of the imperfections. We want to preserve the historical truth.”

Soul on Fire recently premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Upcoming screenings include the New York Jewish Film Festival and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival prior to theatrical and streaming release.