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Trank said the film is rooted in the question of what happens after trauma: “How do you come out of that? How do you rebuild your life?”
By Shula Rosen
Richard Trank spent decades documenting Jewish history and Israeli life from Los Angeles. This fall, he decided the next chapter of his career belonged in Israel itself.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker, known for his long tenure at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Moriah Films, arrived in Tel Aviv in October and immediately began building a new slate of projects centered on resilience after the October 7 attacks.
Trank said the decision to relocate was overdue. “I wish I had made this decision earlier,” he told The Times of Israel, reflecting on his recent aliyah.
The move followed leadership changes at the Wiesenthal Center, where he had worked for more than 40 years. The institution shifted Moriah Films away from its traditional documentary focus, leaving little room for the kind of work that defined his career.
With a new production company, Sea Point Films and Media, Trank has turned to subjects he believes Israelis and global audiences need to see. His central project is a documentary titled “The Road Home,” which follows survivors of the October 7 attacks as they begin rebuilding their lives.
He said the film is rooted in the question of what happens after trauma: “How do you come out of that? How do you rebuild your life?”
Trank sees connections between this effort and his earlier work.
He won an Academy Award for co-producing The Long Way Home, which chronicled Holocaust survivors rebuilding after World War II. The filmmaker said that when considering the new documentary, “I thought back about the survivors that I grew up with who went through the Shoah… This is about Israelis who are rebuilding their lives.”
During filming, he interviewed a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre whose determination affected him deeply.
He recalled being struck by “the trauma that she went through, but at the same time, this determination to go on with life and rebuild.”
Alongside The Road Home, Trank is advancing another film, Always 28, about Jewish US Army officer Nathan Baskind, whose remains were only recently recovered from a Nazi mass grave and reburied with military honors in France.
Despite the intensity of the work, Trank said his new life in Israel already feels right. “Landing here and knowing that as I got off that plane, I was a citizen… was very, very, very exhilarating,” he told Times of Israel. He added that the move lets him contribute in ways that felt increasingly difficult in the United States, where he believes it has become harder to tell stories that depict Israel in a fair light.
For Trank, the motivation is both personal and professional: “I need to be here. I don’t have to hide who I am.”
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