Hutton Honors College

Discussion Lunch with Pearl Gluck
Filmmaker, Storyteller, and Yiddish Ethnographer

• Friday, Feb. 23, 2007
• 12:30-2 p.m.
• Harlos House, 1331 E. Tenth St.
• SIGN-UP REQUIRED

PEARL GLUCK, a story collector, story teller, and documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared at the Sundance Film Festival and has been supported with a variety of grants, including the Fulbright.

Often collaborating with others, Pearl Gluck tells stories that cross cultures. Her films include GREAT BALLS OF FIRE, a homeless man's response to September 11; ARUSI, the story of an Iranian American's effort to introduce his "American military brat" wife to his culture by taking her to Iran for a proper Iranian wedding; TRANCE, an account of the exchanges between the Asian and Jewish communities in New York's Lower East Side; and DIVAN, her own response to the Hasidic background into which she was born but left as a teenager.

Described as lively and engaging, Gluck has won considerable attention and acclaim for her films, including DIVAN, a documentary that tells a universal story -- "a journey to the past to find a way to live in the future" -- in its very personal search for a couch that embodies her family and religious roots in the Yiddish-speaking communities of Eastern Europe. Born in 1972 to Hasidic parents in Brooklyn, she was expected "to grow up, marry a Torah scholar, and have children." Instead, after her parents' divorce, she moved with her mother to the secular world of Manhattan, a renegade in a family that survived the Holocaust. On her journey to find the family couch, she meets "some wonderful characters," including an ex-communist cousin in Budapest, a Yiddish guide in Ukraine, and a descendent of the Kossonye rebbe.

On campus for three weeks to work on a collection of Yiddish stories, Gluck is a Fellow at IU's Institute for Advanced Study. Described in one review as "quite a lady," she will deliver a public lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, 7:30 p.m., in Jordan A100: "Two Steps Back: Uprooting the Autodocumentary."

For additional information on Pearl Gluck and her work, please visit her Website.

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