Moses Man: Finding Home, is the true story of Holocaust survivor, Kalman Haber, who fled Vienna, Austria during Hitler’s annexation and his perilous nine-year journey through Europe, Cyprus, Palestine, and Africa to find home and freedom in America.
Moses Man: Finding Home debuted as Moses Man in New York City at the 2015 New York Musical Festival (NYMF) at the exact time Germany opened their borders to Syrian refugees. This looming humanitarian crisis impacted the musical’s creators Deborah Haber (playwright and lyricist) and Casey Filiaci (composer) and made it clear to them that they had a responsibility to link the circumstances of past and present. And the crises only continue as can now be seen in Myanmar, Yemen, Syria, along with many other countries.
Currently the creators are transitioning the Moses Man: Finding Home, story to not just “never forget,” but to pose the ultimate question to the musical’s audiences, “How can persecution, displacement and genocide be “never ending?” They will juxtapose the story of the Holocaust survivor’s journey to find home with contemporary stories of refugee displacement and survival focusing on the Middle East and Africa. The traditionally-based musical will be repositioned through an intersection of its original music with world music and its historical and contemporary social justice themes will be highlighted through the inclusion of the work of renowned visual artists and documentary film elements to support this innovative direction of the Moses Man: Finding Home musical.
There are more than 70 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world today and the average amount of time someone will be displaced is seventeen years. There are a multitude of reasons causing the displacements that include political and religious persecution, regime change, economics, and climate change. The impact of this upsurge of refugees, the most the world has ever known, has only begun to be fully felt. Education, national security, humanitarian aid, social services, policies, economics, children, families and identities are being impacted in communities all over the world. This is a truly global issue that may have roots in places such as Syria or Somalia, but is quickly transcending the boundaries of displacement camps, receiving countries, and war-torn nations.
DEEP Arts is partnering with Blue Sky Project Films to create a feature-length documentary film that chronicles the development of the musical Moses Man: Finding Home, the creative process of the musical theatre team, interviews with additional artists on how their particular works based on displacement reflect the refugee experience, scholarly input, and most importantly the testimony of real refugees, past and present. The documentary film Finding Home is projected to be completed at the end of 2019 and will be made available for in-classroom use.
David Marshall is a multi-Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and the president of Blue Sky Project. His work as a producer, director, director of photography, and editor has taken him around the world many times in his 27-year career. He holds a B.S. in photography/film and a M.F.A. in fine art/animation. Dave's documentary films reflect his interest in human rights and the power of contextualized history. Finding Home will include interviews with artists and scholars, refugee testimonies, footage of the artists at work, audio and video testimony of Holocaust survivors Kalman and Lily Haber and archival and contemporary photos. The film is intended for primetime distribution on public television with PBS affiliate WXXI commitment to air the film, and interface with the distributor American Public Television.
DEEP Arts and Blue Sky Project have established partnerships with: The Global Center of The School of Global and International at Indiana University, The Department of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and HIAS Welcome the Stranger – Protect the Refugee in New York City for support with scholarship to advance and inform the project.
