George Clooney to Narrate New Shimon Peres Documentary
by Shiryn Ghermezian
George Clooney. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Actor George Clooney will narrate a new documentary about late Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, Variety reported on Tuesday.
“Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres” will be produced by Moriah Films, the film division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC).
Clooney, who met Peres several times, agreed recently to sign on as the film’s narrator. The documentary was first announced in August 2017, and includes interviews with former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and singer Barbara Streisand.
The film’s director, Oscar-winning documentarian Richard Trank, said there is a screening of “Never Stop Dreaming” scheduled for June 13 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the film’s general release will most likely coincide with the second anniversary of Peres’ passing, on Sept. 28.
Peres, a former Israeli president and prime minister, asked Moriah Films to create a documentary about his life story nine months before his September 2016 death at the age of 92, Trank previously revealed.
Moriah began working on the film in January 2016 and Trank said, “We deferred production on our documentary about David Ben-Gurion to start working on ‘Never Stop Dreaming.’ We wound up with about 50 hours of footage of Shimon and I was struck by how he wanted to keep learning. He said that dreams are what kept him young.”
“Never Stop Dreaming” will be the 16th documentary produced by Moriah Films. The production company releases documentaries that “focus on the 3,500-year-old Jewish experience as well as contemporary human rights and ethical issues,” according to its website. Two of Moriahs’ films, “Genocide” and “The Long Way Home,” have been the recipients of Academy Awards for Best Feature Documentary.
Moriah Films is headed by SWC founder and dean Rabbi Marvin Hier, who is also a two-time Oscar winner and the only clergyman who is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, according to Variety.
