The Film That Helped Raise Critical Funds in One Evening

The Chabad Russian Center bought land in Sunny Isles before they had the money to build on it.

What they had instead was twenty years of proof. Rabbi Alex and Chani Kaller started in their own home in 2003, then condo rooms, then borrowed storefronts, gathering Russian-speaking Jewish families who had nowhere else to go. The land sat. COVID delayed everything. And then a community that never stopped showing up raised what it took to put a six-story building on the water at Biscayne Bay.

My job was to make a room full of people feel why it mattered, on the night it counted.

The challenge

A gala film has one job, and it isn’t information. Everyone in that room already knows the building exists. They’re standing in it.

The organization brought me in alongside director Rabbi Yaakov Garfinkle to make a series of films for the evening. He wrote it. I filmed, edited, and produced. The main piece had to do something harder than showcase a property. It had to take a room of people who had already given, and make them understand what they had actually built.

And it had to be delivered fast.

The approach

Rabbi Garfinkle’s script was structured around five gateways: vision, prayer, learning, community, and youth. My job was to execute that vision on screen.

So I didn’t cut a tour. I built a through-line. A recurring structural motif returns at every chapter break, adding a pillar each time, so the audience feels the building assembling itself across the length of the film. Each of the five themes gets a visual cue planted early and paid off later, so by the final section the room recognizes where it’s going before the narrator gets there.

Aerial work tied the chapters together and gave the campus the scale it deserved on a big screen.

But not all of this story lived in Florida. This is a Russian-speaking community, and the people who carried it here are spread across the world. So my team in Moscow and my team in Israel conducted the rest of the interviews on the ground, in the places those families actually came from.

Then I cut all of it, including hours of footage in a language I don’t speak. I edited the Russian interviews through a translator, which means every pause, every emphasis, every place a sentence turned had to be verified instead of felt. It’s slower than cutting in English. It’s the only way the Russian material carries the same weight as everything around it.

The hard part was never the footage. A gorgeous building shoots itself. The hard part is making people feel twenty years of wanting something before it existed.

The result

The films played at the gala. That evening, the community raised what the campus needed.

The room didn’t watch a building. It watched itself get built.

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