George Clooney to narrate film on life of Shimon Peres
‘Never Stop Dreaming,’ featuring Obama, Clinton and Streisand, is slated for June release.
By AMY SPIROUpdated: MARCH 22, 2018 04:47GEORGE CLOONEY, Rabbi Marvin Hier and Richard Trank pose for a photo in the recording booth(photo credit: Courtesy)
George Clooney will be the narrator for an upcoming film about the life of former president Shimon Peres.The film, Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres, is produced by Moriah Films, a division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and is slated to premiere in New York in June.The center told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that Clooney recorded his narration several weeks ago and met with Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center’s director.The film is directed and produced by Richard Trank, who managed to record 50 hours of interviews with Peres in the months before his death in September 2016. Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also make appearances, in addition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former British prime minister Tony Blair and Barbra Streisand.Obama, Clinton and Blair all attended Peres’s funeral in Jerusalem in 2016. Streisand flew to Israel in 2013 to celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday and perform “Avinu Malkeinu” for him.The film’s first screening is scheduled for June 13 at the Kennedy Center in Washington.In the film, Obama recalls meeting Peres for the first time as a US senator.“The graciousness with which he received me, the genuine interest he had taken in my campaign, the degree to which he expressed hope that the kind of optimistic politics that I was trying to represent was something that could be duplicated and captured in the Middle East, particularly my appeal to young people – it was, I think, a great and flattering moment for me,” he said.Trank’s most recent film, also for Moriah films, was 2015’s The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, based on veteran diplomat Yehuda Avner’s 2010 book.Trank has also directed films about Theodor Herzl, Simon Wiesenthal and Winston Churchill. He won an Academy Award in 1997 for The Long Way Home, which followed Jewish refugees after the Holocaust until the establishment of the State of Israel.
