Faculty member's film makes world premiere Jan. 18 in New York City

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State faculty filmmaker’s provocative short film, which centers on a Holocaust survivor and sex-ed teacher who has been leading a secret life for decades, will make its world premiere Jan. 18 in New York City.

“Castles in the Sky” focuses on a woman who had secretly presented slam poetry outside her cloistered Hasidic milieu in Brooklyn. The film is scheduled to screen among a group of short films directed by women at 8:30 p.m. Jan. 18 at the Walter Reade Theatre. The screening is part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New York Jewish Film Festival.

The 33-minute film was based on personal experience for faculty filmmaker Pearl Gluck, the Donald P. Bellisario Career Advancement Professor in the Department of Film Production. Gluck, originally from Hasidic Brooklyn, teaches directing and screenwriting at Penn State.

"The film explores my relationship to my Hasidic past, the women who helped me form my own feminist interpretations of the faith, and my own history as a slam poet and slam hostess in the Lower East Side in the early '90s at the KGB Bar and the Nuyorican Poetry Café," Gluck said. “My own great aunt Malke, herself a survivor of the Holocaust, and herself unable to have children because of the experimentations in Auschwitz, would always warn me not to 'build castles in the sky' with my artistic aspirations.

"This project is my filmic approach to asking questions about sex education in the Hasidic world, the impact of survivors (and unethical experiments) on the next generation of women, and the hope for the integration of creative expression into a world so deeply informed by genocide and dogma."

Actor Lynn Cohen, in her final role, stars as Malke, alongside the late poet Venus Thrash in “Castles in the Sky.” Cohen died in 2020 and Thrash in 2021.

The crew for the film included a number of Gluck’s students working alongside award-winning film professionals. Penn State graduates now working in the film industry who were involved with the film were associate producer Morgan Seiff (class of 2021), editor Allan Guerrero (class of 2017) and titles designer and animator Jessica Snyder (class of 2022).

The film was made possible in part by Gluck's Bellisario Career Advancement Professorship and a grant from the Jewish Studies program at Penn State.

Gluck’s work has appeared at Sundance, Tribeca, the Cannes Film Festival, and on PBS. She recently returned from a Fulbright research and development sabbatical in Israel and Poland.

Her first documentary feature film, “Divan” (2004) opened theatrically at Film Forum in New York City, was broadcast on the Sundance Channel and played across the country and internationally at festivals. Her second feature, “The Turn Out” (2019), deals with sex trafficking at local truck stops and is a hybrid film.

Gluck’s fiction short films, “Where Is Joel Baum” (2012), “Junior” (2017), “Summer” (2018), and “Write Me” (2019), have won three Best Actress awards.