People are saying…
Shana Penn, Executive Director, Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture
"The film is absolutely WONDERFUL. Beautifully, masterfully filmed, compelling storytelling, I was thoroughly immersed, enchanted. It is so difficult to create a masterly film from such complex material over an extended period of time. What to include, what to leave out? How did you ever manage it? Congratulations!! Perfection!!"
Margot Carvallo, Neighbor Newspapers
“Raise the Roof crosses the limits of religion to show selfless compassion."
Raise the Roof made the 2015 list of Professor Bernstein’s Must-See Films
Well known Atlanta film critic, Dr. Matthew Bernstein is the Chair the Film and Media Department at Emory University. http://ajff.org/article/2014/12/professor-bernsteins-must-see-films
“Here’s an extraordinary venture: a multiyear, multinational endeavor to re-erect a grand wooden Polish synagogue that rivals the greatest wooden architecture anywhere in the world. Best of all, this is a briskly paced detective tale to find out “not just how it was built, but who built it and why. …the team recovered more than an object, they recovered a world.”
Deborah Lipstadt, Professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University
“Bravi to all involved in making this film and even more to those who made the project happen. What a spectacular tribute to a vanished and now partially recovered world. Yasher Koach.”
Ruth Ellen Gruber, Coordinator of the web site www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu
“A wonderful film about an exciting project that powerfully brings home the message that Jews were —and are—not just “people of the book” but people of dynamic visual art, fantasy and color. It was a pleasure and a privilege to watch the beginning of the construction of the painted Gwoździec ceiling in a remote corner of southeast Poland, and then to marvel at the splendor of the completed structure which is, deservedly, the centerpiece of the new POLIN museum. Raise the Roof captures the excitement -- but also the dedication, scholarship and serious purpose of creation and re-creation.”
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Program Director of the Core Exhibition of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
“The recovery of this lost object is an epic story. All of a sudden, the image of Polish Jews known only from black and white photographs, too often an image of poverty, piety, and persecution, recedes and a vibrant world in living color, a world rich in imagination and spirit, takes its place. This is an unforgettable experience, a transformative one.”
Stuart I. Frolick, Director–Editorial Services, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
"Raise the Roof" is about so much that matters: history, The Holocaust, collective memory, freedom of religion, sacred places, scholarly research, education, community, architecture, art, and craft...the possibility of resurrection and redemption, and, of triumph over tragedy.
The filmmakers document this multi dimensional project with patience, taste, sophistication, intellect, and passion. Precise editing of archival and contemporary footage and beautiful sound track throughout... When the "talking heads" speak, they add context and deepen our understanding with an economy of scale. Not a word is wasted.
Recreation of the palette for the painted panels; and the care and skill with which the painting is executed across venues throughout Poland—all culminating with the project's installation in its permanent museum home, provide an exhilarating narrative arc and conclusion to the story and film.
I hope "Raise the Roof" will be screened throughout the world at both secular and religious high schools, institutions of higher learning in art and architecture, as well as in spiritual communities. It's interesting, informative, uplifting and hopeful.
Biographies of Featured Commentators and Composers/Musicians
Q&A with Yari Wolinsky, Director
Q&A with Cary Wolinsky, Producer
Q&A with Rick and Laura Brown, Handshouse Studio