Palinka Pictures

Filmmaker and professor Pearl Gluck’s provocative latest dramatic short film centers on Malke, a Holocaust survivor and sex-ed teacher who has been leading a secret life for decades: performing slam poetry on the Lower East Side. Castles in the Sky features commanding performances from actor Lynn Cohen, who died in 2020, and poet Venus Thrash, who died in 2021.

Pearl Gluck travels to Hungary to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. En route for the ancestral divan, Pearl encounters a colorful cast of characters who provide guidance and inspiration.