Abraham Ravett

The filmmaker's search for the German teenage girl that took care of him between 1948-1950 in Walbrzych, Poland where he was born.

If his father had lived beyond the age of seventy-four, the following may have been the cinematic response to the city where in 1944, he last saw his family. Filmed in the mid-1980's, Lodz, Poland. Constructed in 2012, Florence, Massachusetts.

A cinematic response to grief and loss.

Utilizing a series of conversations conducted over a thirteen year period between the filmaker and his mother, THE MARCH details one woman's recollections of the 1945 Death March from Auchwitz. -Light Cone

The Brighton Beach-Coney Island boardwalk is a long, winding, ocean front walkway adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean. Photographed over a three year period, the landscape rendered reflects the seasonal changes, daily activities and the filmmaker's projected future.

Iwate Prefecture in northeastern Japan is the setting for "The Legends of Tono," a unique collection of regional folktales, gathered in the early 20th century by Yanagita Kunio. The tales manifest and explain invisible forces and malevolent events which shape the psycho-cultural dimensions of Japanese indigenous beliefs and folk faith. Inspired by "The Legends of Tono," HORSE/KAPPA/HOUSE records the surrounding landscape in a number of small villages throughout Iwate Prefecture in order to create a cinematic space which echoes, by implication and association, the external and unseen world in the environment.

In this non-narrative, meditative, and poignant film, footage of life from the Lodz Ghetto is juxtaposed with the chanting of "Kel Maleh Rachamim," a plea to God to let the souls of those "slaughtered and burned" find peace.

Filmmaker Abraham Ravett attempts to reconcile issues in his life as the child of a Holocaust survivor in this experimental non-narrative film. Ravett reflects upon his relationships with his family, from his now-deceased father (who survived both the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz) to his own young children. He utilizes family photographs and film footage, archival film footage from the Ghetto Fighters' House in Israel, cell animation by Emily Hubley, and computer graphics to create a film about memory, death, and what critic Bruce Jenkins calls "the power of the photographic image and sound to resurrect the past."

The lives of people are observed within the confines of one, twenty-two story high rise apartment complex and its adjacent courtyard in Trump Village, Brooklyn, New York. Shot from one vantage point over a period of fifteen months, THE BALCONY, speculates on the evanescence of all our lives.

At 26, Abraham Ravett learned that his mother had previously been married and lost her family at Auschwitz, including his 6-year-old half-sister, Toncia. Half Sister is a cinematic amalgam of memory and imagination, inspired by Ravett's conception of a life that would have been.

A direct cinema observation of student and faculty life at Haverhill High School in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Prior to leaving Hampshire College in 1980, Tom was working on a 16mm film inspired by Jose Arguelles' book, The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression. Shot in sync and MOS, the footage reflects Tom's interest in perception, human consciousness, and signaled his evolving interest in fusing non-fiction, experimental and dramatic genres. All the original materials for this unfinished film were stored at the LA home of Ken Levin, another Hampshire College alum who along with several other students, worked with Tom on this project, which he called the Architecture of Mountains.

"In the process of making The March, my mother spoke about the wooden shoes she and other inmates wore on their forced march out of Auschwitz. She called them "trepches." Utilizing one of the optically printed segments from The March, I've re-visited that filmmaking experience and our exchange."