A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff

Q&As with Alicia J. Rose (director), Alicia Jo Rabins (creator, actor, composer), and Lara Cuddy (producer) on 1/17.

Set on Wall Street in 2008, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff offers a singular perspective on devastating financial fraud. When director Alicia J. Rose saw musician/poet Alicia Jo Rabins’s “one-woman socio-political-personal rock opera” onstage, she conceived of the live show adapted to the screen, with Rabins playing herself in New York’s financial district, obsessing over Madoff and the capitalist system that enabled him from the vantage point of her ninth-story studio apartment, a stone’s throw from the hub of his crimes. Pushing the concept of hybrid film to necessary extremes to encompass the head-spinning scope of Madoff’s amorality, Rose’s feature pivots from fantasy to animation to music-video riffs on real-life interviews, anchored by Rabins’s presence as an artist witnessing with morbid fascination and unnerving proximity a global economic collapse. Rose aptly deems the ensuing work “the most accessible experimental film people will see.”