JEWISH SENTINEL

24 JEWISH WORLD • NOVEMBER 18-24, 2022 ketball star Kyrie have been em- braced by white supremacists. Adlesic said that she hopes the HBO on October 26th, four years to the day after the attack — and at a time when attention in the Unit- timing of the film “only reinforc- es the urgency for the conversa- tion that needs to be had, and the intervention that needs to be had.” She’s had support from several big names: performers Michael Keaton and Billy Porter and Jewish entre- preneur Mark Cuban, all of whom grew up in Pittsburgh, have all signed on as producers, while Jew- ish Broadway star Idina Menzel wrote and performed an original song for the film. T he movie was in a large sense shaped by what the survi- vors themselves wanted. Adlesic, whose previous documentary “I Am Evidence” interviewed rape victims about rape kit backlogs, took her approach to her subjects’ trauma seriously, relocating to Pittsburgh to make herself more readily available to them whenev- er they felt like talking. Working with survivor and Tree Of Life Survivors Talk HBO documentary on synagogue-goers who tell a tale of horror By ANDREW LAPIN T rish Adlesic was visiting her father in Pittsburgh on the day a white-supremacist gunman walked into the city’s Tree of Life synagogue building and murdered 11 people. Almost immediately, the direc- tor started filming her surround- ings with the aim of producing a documentary about the tragedy, bringing on a Tree of Life congre- gant, Eric Schuman, as an editor and producer. Drawing on her own experiences conducting “trau- ma-informed” interviews, Adlesic reached out to survivors hoping to create “a platform for them to speak out, to speak about their loved ones, to honor them, to pay tribute, [and] to try to find a way to unite us.” The resulting documentary, “A Tree of Life,” which premiered on ed States once again turned to an- ti-Semitism, following comments by the rapper Kanye West and bas- FILM REVIEW continued on page 27 Promo for the documentary, featuring a photo of loved ones remembering the dead at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill at a Commemoration Ceremony in 2021.