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THE TEAM

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MARC BENNETT

CO-DIRECTOR, CO-WRITER, CO-PRODUCER

Marc Bennett has spent his adult life creating powerful imagery and stories in both print and on film.


As an artist and photographer, his work has been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States and is a part of many public and private collections, including Yad Vashem, Holocaust Museum LA, the Museum of Tolerance, the California Afro-American Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation.


As a director, he has helmed multiple feature films, documentaries and music videos. His credits include the feature film Should’ve Been Romeo, the documentaries Life Matters, A Journey of Hope and Survival and the award-winning Hot Flash Havoc, narrated by Goldie Hawn.


Marc recently directed the animated short film The Tattooed Torah, based on the renowned children’s book about The Holocaust. The film has been an official selection of over 50 film festivals around the world, winning numerous awards including Best Animated Short and Best Adaptation.


Marc just completed co-directing the feature documentary For the Living with Tim Roper and producer Lisa Effress to spark an urgent conversation about how our innate human empathy might actually be the key to disrupting an uncontrollable wave of dehumanization around the world. The same dehumanization which invariably led to a centuries-long pattern of the worst crime imaginable: Genocide.

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CO-DIRECTOR, CO-WRITER

TIM ROPER

Tim Roper is an award-winning Writer-Director with a diverse mix of experience in both filmmaking and brand building. After graduating with a Film degree from The University of Texas at Austin with a minor in History, Tim began a 25-year career writing and directing short form branded content and crafting screenplays.


In 2016, Tim founded F. Yeah & Associates LLC—a live action “branded content engine” that offers both comedic and dramatic storytelling solutions to an industry struggling to balance creativity, audacity and frugality.


As one of the few successful, road-tested hyphenates in the world of branded content, Tim’s writing and directing work has been honored at Cannes, Museum of Modern Art, The Emmys, The One Club, The London International Film Festival to name a few and has appeared on the Super Bowl and profiled on 60 Minutes.


In 2019, Tim joined Marc Bennett and Lisa Effress to begin writing, co-directing and narrating the feature documentary For The Living as a cautionary tale for a society grappling with the two extremes of human nature: Dehumanization and Empathy.


Tim asserts that this film—which veers between the intimate and the historical—is not merely about The Holocaust. Or any genocide. For The Living is about each and every one of us. And, ultimately, which “road” we choose to travel.

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LISA EFFRESS

PRODUCER

A highly-accomplished Ad Agency Executive Producer, Lisa Effress spent over two decades shaping scores of award-winning, multi-million-dollar productions for a litany of blue chip brands as well as plenty of astonishingly smaller and scrappy ones.


Lisa’s vast experience and resourcefulness have allowed her to serve as both Head of Production and/or Producer on multiple short films including several for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project documenting the vital work done at COP 28 in Dubai, UAE.


Lisa recently produced the animated short, The Tattooed Torah which is based on the renowned children’s book that gently and artfully introduced generations of children to The Holocaust. The film version is now being used as curriculum and has been screened by millions of students in classrooms around the world.


These experiences culminated in Lisa’s current position as Managing Partner of the full-service, award-winning postproduction facility, 11 Dollar Bill, that handled the lion’s share of editorial, animation and graphics for the documentary feature For the Living.


As producer of For the Living Lisa was reunited with Co-Directors Marc Bennett and Tim Roper in chronicling the annual cycling event between Auschwitz-Birkenau and Krakow, Poland called Ride for the Living--a story that provokes an urgent conversation about the way human beings regard and treat one other in our increasingly dehumanizing world.

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BRETT KOPIN

CO-WRITER

Brett Kopin was born and raised in Chicago, IL and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013, where he majored in English Literature and Creative Writing. He received Rabbinic Ordination from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles in 2021.

 

He served as a rabbi at Milken Community School in Los Angeles for three years as a high school educator and as the Middle School Division Rabbi. In 2023, he and his wife started a community out of their home for young Jews called “Base LA,” where they host and teach regularly.


In January 2022, he co-authored a book with Dr. Ron Wolfson called Creating Sacred Communities, selected as the USCJ's 2022 "Big Read." He is also the co-screenwriter of the award-winning animated film, The Tattooed Torah, and the feature-length documentary, For The Living. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, and co-authored the magazine's cover story, "Bringing Synagogues Back to Life", in the April 2022 edition.


He is honored to be part of For The Living, an important documentary film whose message is critical for our times.

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DANIEL ALCHEH

COMPOSER

For more than two decades, composer & songwriter Daniel Alcheh has written and produced music for feature films, animation, documentaries, TV shows and countless commercials, as well as music for ballet and theater.

 

Alcheh began as a soundtrack producer for Dover Kosashvili's feature Late Marriage, one of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Films of 2002. Scoring highlights include The Trouble with Bliss, the comedy series Svetlana, additional music for The War with Grandpa, starring Robert De Niro and the Russian sci-fi feature Cosmoball (Gatekeeper of the Galaxy).

 

Internationally, Daniel’s scoring work includes the Chinese sci-fi comedy feature Impossible, and the CCTV documentaries Together in Guangzhou and Memories of Beijing.

 

Daniel recently wrote the orchestral score for The Tattooed Torah - an animated short narrated by the late Ed Asner. The film has been dubbed and translated into dozens of languages and also features several soloists and a choir.

 

Alcheh just completed the score to the feature documentary For The Living, directed by Marc Bennett and Tim Roper and produced by Lisa Effress featuring an orchestral score recorded with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and some renowned US soloists. For the film’s end credits Daniel produced an original cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Further On (Up the Road), sung by the great Joan Osborne (One of Us).

FEATURING
(In Order Of Appearance)

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MICHAEL BERENBAUM

Holocaust scholar, Founding Project Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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MARCEL ZIELINSKI

Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned as a child in the Plaszow Concentration Camp and then the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp
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ROBERT DESMOND

Software developer. Passions: Cycling, History and The Holocaust
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BEN FERENCZ

American Lawyer, Former Prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials
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JONATHAN ORNSTEIN

Chief Executive Officer of the Krakow Jewish Community Center, located just 60 miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau
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GUGULETHU MOYO

Zimbabwe genocide survivor, International Human Rights Lawyer
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JONATHAN GREENBLATT

National Director & CEO, Anti-Defamation League
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STEPHEN SMITH

Executive Director Emeritus, USC Shoah Foundation
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TIMOTHY SNYDER

Professor of History, Yale University. Author, "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning"
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DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH

Professor of Philosophy, University of New England. Author, "Less Than Human"
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NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

Astrophysicist. Educator. Keen observer of human nature
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BERNARD OFFEN

Holocaust survivor who spent his childhood in the Nazi concentration camps Plaszow, Julag, Mauthausen, Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau during which 59 members of his family were murdered
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FRANS DE WAAL

Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Emory University. Author, "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society"
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KIMBERLY SCHONERT-REICHL

Chair in Social Emotional Learning, University of Illinois at Chicago

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