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 personal risk, took them
into their homes as an extraordinary act of human decency. 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 Slesin 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. Aviva 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. Aviva 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. Aviva 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.
Ms. Aviva 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. Aviva Slesin is President of Aviva Films.
