Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen
What: Performance of The Birthday of the World
When: Sunday, December 14 · 10:30am – 12pm EST
Where: The Tara
2345 Cheshire Bridge Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30324
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PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Winner of the Audience Award at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
The fall of 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof, the film Pauline Kael (The New Yorker) called “the most powerful movie musical ever made.” Narrated by Jeff Goldblum, FIDDLER’S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN captures the humor and drama of director Norman Jewison’s quest to recreate the lost world of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia and re-envision the beloved stage hit as a wide-screen epic.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim puts us in the director’s chair and in Jewison’s heart and mind, drawing on behind-the-scenes footage and never-before-seen stills as well as original interviews with Jewison, Topol (Tevye), composer John Williams, production designer Robert F. Boyle, film critic Kenneth Turan, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and actresses Rosalind Harris, Michele Marsh, and Neva Small (Tevye’s daughters).
The film explores how the experience of making Fiddler deepened Jewison as an artist and revived his soul.
Post Show conversation with director Daniel Raim moderated by executive producer Matthew Bernstein, Emory University professor of film and media. Film run time 88 minutes.
Partners
Atlanta Film Society
The Spring
The Tara
*Winner of the Audience Award at the 2022 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
DIRECTORS BIOGRAPHY
Documentary filmmaker Daniel Raim is an Academy Award–nominated director and AFI alumnus. His work celebrates the artistry of cinema’s masters and unsung heroes, blending emotional depth with rare archival discoveries. Raim’s debut, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (2000), earned an Academy Award nomination for its portrait of Hitchcock’s production designer Robert F. Boyle. He went on to direct Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story (Cannes Film Festival, 2015), distributed worldwide and now in development for Broadway. Raim has created more than thirty documentaries for the Criterion Collection, and his later features include Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers (2019, TCM) and Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen (2022, Zeitgeist Films/Kino Lorber). His most recent film, The Ozu Diaries—produced in association with Shochiku and TCM—had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.