Bernie Madoff’s spectacular Ponzi scheme fraud was exposed in 2008, the year Alicia Jo Rabins was working in a studio on the ninth floor of an abandoned office building on Wall Street. Her new film “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff” came from what she calls her obsession with the man, his Ponzi scheme, and the system that allowed them to thrive for decades. The Kaddish, a Judaic prayer for the dead, can also be said as a kind of excommunication for a person who has committed a heinous crime. The film is playing this Friday, March 5, at the Portland International Film Festival. We talk with Rabins about her genre-bending, first-person documentary, blending elements of memoir, documentary and musical theatre to create a compelling historical narrative.