Ronit Bezalel decided to come to Chicago to do her graduate work in film after reading Directing the Documentary by Columbia College professor Michael Rabiger. Soon the seeds of her own documentary were planted. “People would say, ‘Avoid the projects, avoid Cabrini.’ And that was very strange for me that there were these areas that you had to avoid, and I didn’t understand why,” she says. “I saw Cabrini when I took the train to school every day on the Ravenswood line, and when I saw that they were tearing it down I wanted to learn more about it.” She decided to cover the dismantling of the housing project for a class.
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Bezalel got her undergraduate degree in Canada–at Montreal’s McGill University–where the national film industry gives healthy support to documentarists. After graduating she took a job at the National Film Board of Canada, and one of her first assignments was as assistant editor on Manufacturing Consent, the acclaimed 1992 documentary about linguist and professional dissident Noam Chomsky.
Since completing her film, which served as her MFA thesis at Columbia, Bezalel has been working part-time at the Community Television Network, a not-for-profit organization that teaches inner-city teens how to make videos, and she’s planning to go to Cyprus in September to help produce a friend’s documentary. She continues to promote Voices of Cabrini, but already her work has garnered praise from its subjects. “It was a fantastic idea, to finally get the voices of the community,” says Pratt. “Before, we’d always been faceless voices in sound bites or nameless faces on the news.”
