Laura Bialis

Judy's path ultimately led to the United States, where, after witnessing race riots in 1963, she dedicated her life to education as a civil rights advocate, touring the country speaking to students and community groups about her experiences and the importance of respect and tolerance.

Bialis met classmates Broderick Fox and Sarah Levy on the first day of USC film school in the fall of 1996.

Nine months later, the three found themselves in the remote Lithuanian countryside, filming Holocaust survivor Judy Meisel as she searched for her father's grave in an abandoned Jewish cemetery just outside the tiny shtetl town of Jasvene.

Their work resulted in the team's acclaimed feature documentary, Tak for Alt – Survival of a Human Spirit.

Bialis is the founder of the Foundation for Documentary Projects, a non-profit organization with the mission of creating documentaries and curricula about important historical and social issues.

Though focused on the narrative filmmaking track, Bialis became drawn to documentary after her classmates’ positive reception to her first short documentary, Attitude (1997), which was initially created as a class project at USC.

The film followed a day in the life of a 13-year-old athlete, actor, and musician, Tyler Dumm, who was blind and also a partial amputee.

While at USC, Bialis also produced and directed Daybreak Berlin.

The film is based on the memoir of German-American artist Ilse-Margret Vogel, who was active in Berlin's unofficial underground during World War II.

Tak for Alt – Survival of a Human Spirit is a 1999 feature-length documentary directed by Laura Bialis, Broderick Fox, and Sarah Levy.

The documentary chronicles the story of Holocaust survivor Judy Meisel, whose experiences during World War II inspired a lifelong campaign for civil rights.

The film weaves archival material and location footage of Meisel retracing her wartime journey – from her birth in a Lithuanian shtetl, to the Kovno ghetto where she worked slave labor in a boot factory, crawling across a frozen river after fleeing a death march from the Stutthoff Concentration Camp, where she watched her mother being taken to the gas chamber, and finally escaping to Denmark at age 16, weighing forty-seven pounds.

Tak for Alt (“Thanks for All” in Danish) received widespread critical acclaim and was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences as “one of the outstanding films of 1999.” It was included in the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, was released theatrically in Los Angeles and aired on PBS.

Tak for Alt won the Anti-Defamation League's Dore Schary Award.

The Jewish Voice said, “The hour-long film is awesome in its method of telling Meisel's amazing story,” and The Hollywood Reporter called it, “a grandly done production.” Film critic Ella Taylor called it “searing”

Reviewer Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “an extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary life,” and “listening to Meisel, it is as though Anne Frank had miraculously lived.”

Hundreds of thousands of high school students have viewed the film as part of Holocaust education programs along with an accompanying curriculum guide, written by Beth Seldin Dotan and Kathleen McSharry.

The film continues to screen annually in schools across the United States.

Refusenik is a 2008 feature-length documentary written, directed, and produced by Laura Bialis, and co-produced by Stephanie Seldin Howard.

Refusenik is the first retrospective documentary to chronicle the thirty-year international human rights campaign to free more than 1.5 million Soviet Jews who tried to escape the pervasive anti-Semitism of postwar Russia.

Refuseniks is the term that Soviet Jews gave themselves when they were refused exit visas.

Told through the eyes of activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the film shows how a small grassroots effort bold enough to confront the Cold War superpower transformed into an international human rights campaign.

The film is a tapestry of first-person accounts of heroism, sacrifice, and ultimately, liberation.

“One of the proudest chapters in Jewish history, the story of the refuseniks demonstrates the need for Jewish solidarity, the importance of the State of Israel, and the responsibilities we face as individuals living in a democracy,” read a review in Jewish Current Issues.

Much of the material used in Refusenik was unique and exclusive to the film.

Interviews with leaders in the movement (including Anatoly Sharansky) were some of the first ever to be recorded.

Many of the photographs and covert film footage – some of it smuggled out of the Soviet Union – had never been seen before by a large audience, and helped make Refusenik a unique portrait of this important story.

“Rarely is the subject (of human rights abuses) addressed as effectively as it is in Laura Bialis' absorbing new documentary, Refusenik,” read a review in The Seattle Times.

“It symbolized hope over tragedy, and the triumph of the human spirit." In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, Bialis said, “The film changed my life. I realized how much each one of us can contribute to what is happening in the world. Working with this material really inspired me not to wait for someone else to change things but to take things into my own hands.”

The film received a 5-star rating from Time Out Chicago reporter Andrea Gronvall who stated, “Bialis, a meticulous researcher and a born storyteller, backs up contemporary interviews with rare footage culled from Russian archives and old home movies.” The Chicago Tribune noted the magnitude of the documentary, “This is a film about an important era in modern history, but it also speaks volumes about the everlasting potency and beauty of the human spirit in search of freedom.” And Variety, called it “absorbing.”

Similar reviews in The Jerusalem Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and New York Jewish Week were favorable.

The film was theatrically released in 15 cities across the United States, and in over 50 community screenings internationally.

Laura Bialis is an American-Israeli filmmaker best known for directing and producing the documentary films Rock in the Red Zone (2015) and Refusenik (2008).

Laura R. Bialis was born in Los Angeles, California and grew up in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, California.

She attended Westlake School for Girls in LA and San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara.

She got her start in production as a summer intern at Rod Lathim's Access Theatre, a nationally acclaimed theater company for performers with disabilities.

Bialis graduated from Stanford University with a degree in history.

At Stanford she specialized in wartime and post-war Eastern European studies, and became fascinated with underground resistance movements.

While at Stanford, Bialis conducted research at the Hoover Institution Archive.

Bialis earned a Master of Fine Arts in Production from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television.