The Listener
Synopsis
When Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, began recording the stories of other survivors in the late 1970s, he wasn’t just preserving memory, he was pioneering a radical act of listening. His work led to the creation of the world’s first video testimony archive and shaped a unique therapeutic approach centered on presence, empathy, and witness.
The documentary follows the final four years of Laub’s life, interweaving powerful archival testimonies with intimate glimpses into his own story: childhood in Romanian camps, a love affair with the daughter of a former Nazi officer, and the moment his own children hear his testimony for the first time. His legacy echoes today in the work of Edut 710, a project inspired by Laub’s methods to document the voices of survivors of the October 7 Hamas massacre.
“The Listener” offers a groundbreaking cinematic response to Claude Lanzmann and Jean Rouch, capturing the act of listening at the heart of Dori Laub’s radical therapeutic approach. It brings his work out of the therapy room and closed archives, making it powerfully accessible to both the public and the cinematic conversation.
Credits
Director(s)
Ohad Ufaz, Micha Livne
Producer(s)
Micha Livne
Script
Ohad Ufaz
Cinematography
Micha Livne
Editor
Chen Shelach
Original Language
Hebrew, English, German
Subtitles
Hebrew, English
Produced with the help of
Galil Film Fund, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Claims Conference Film Fund
Sound Designer
Lee Zohar
Coloring
Aviran Aldema
Festival Highlights
Haifa International Film Festival, Israel, Official Selection, 2025
Reviews
-
"63 years after the Cannes Film Festival sparked a revolution in the relationship between documentary and fiction with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s groundbreaking film "Chronicle of a Summer", The Listener arrives. In a sophisticated intertextual dialogue with Rouch and Claude Lanzmann, it introduces a new revolutionary work - one that achieves the impossible: documenting what is often considered undocumentable—the act of listening itself. At its centre is the ultimate listener, Dori Laub, the originator of a radical therapeutic methodology based on listening. The film redeems Laub’s work from the confines of the therapy room and from preserved yet largely inaccessible archives, rendering it in a clear cinematic language that is both accessible to the wider public and vital to contemporary cinematic discourse. A unique and original film, The Listener is poised to become a landmark and seminal contribution to the history of cinematic testimony."
- Prof. Aner Preminger, Film Scholar
