Vete y vive

The closing night of last year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival turned out to be more than just the screening of a movie. There was drama in the Castro Theater, many in a mostly Jewish audience sobbing audibly in response to the story of an Ethopian child escaping to Israel by pretending to be Jewish. In June 2007, "Live and Become" is being released commercially in the U.S.

Forty-seven-year-old Radu Mihaileanu - Romanian-born, raised in Israel, now a French filmmaker, director of the much-honored "Train of Life" - created a complex, honest, deeply affecting work in "Live and Become" ("Va, vis et deviens"). In the post-Holocaust world of many Jews trying to pass for gentile, Mihaileanu's true and truthful story shows the opposite: a mother's denial of a child as her own, forcing him to adopt a new identity and religion in order to survive - as a Jew, in Israel, escaping the deadly Ethopian famine and war.

Yet another meaningful reference is Imre Gyöngyössy's 1983 "The Revolt of Job" ("Jób lázadása"), about a Hungarian Jewish peasant couple adopting a Christian child, raising him as a Christian, and refuse to recognize him as their own when they are being taken away, again to assure the child's survival. (The child lived, and grew up to be the writer and director of the film about his own story.) Mihaileanu's film is based on true events. In 1985, the Mossad supervised an amazing drive, "Operation Moses," the airlift of thousands of Falasha, Ethiopian Jews, believed to be descendants of Menilek I, the son of the Queen of Sheba (Makeda) and King Solomon. Thousands died on the march to Sudan where the Israeli airlift operated, but even more escaped, arrived in Israel, were accepted by the country - if not without religious and political controversy.

History and politics are just the background to "Live and Become," the title stemming from the heartbreaking command of the boy's mother: go, don't tell anyone who you really are, become a Jew, do not come back.

Three actors play Schlomo (the name given to the boy at the Ellis-Island-like refugee center) at various times of his life. The film's greatest impact is from the child Schlomo (Moshe Agazai), who must learn new customs, a new religion, Hebrew, Yiddish, and French (of his adoptive parents) at the same, forgetting his Amharic. His initial transition from the refugee camp to modern Israel is astonishing, at one unforgettable moment, while taking his first shower, he is trying to stop the water from going down the drain, panicking at the sinful waste.

Mihaileanu is a skilled, powerful moviemaker: he is sticking to the central message, staying with his characters, keeps telling what is the truth for them, but the direction, acting, cinematography are glossy-professional. What makes the film extraordinary - what creates all the crying in the audience - is its honest and effective portrayal of the young refugee's isolation and loneliness, made worse by his belief that his escape is at the cost of his mother's life, in exchange for a lie he feels he must live, even as he becomes an authentic member of Israeli society.

The cast is uniformly outstanding, but Schlomo's adoptive parents are especially memorable. Moroccan-Israeli actress Yael Abecassis' warmth and strength, Moroccan-French actor Roschdy Zem's rough integrity create a true and enviable family environment - but there is nothing easy or false about the young refugee's difficult journey and internal tribulations.

Just returned from the first screening of this movie. An amazing start to the Berlinale Film Festival. It was long (2 and 1/2 hours), absorbing, well-scripted/acted, and very moving. The director and the lead actor were there afterwards and we applauded them heartily. This is what a film festival is about.

The basic plot follows the life of a young Ethiopian boy, Shlomo, whose mother realizes that he can be saved if he poses as one of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews. They were clandestinely airlifted to Israel from Sudan in the mid 1980s. This is a story of migration,assimilation and identity through the eyes of an individual. It shows how Israel deals with these 'different' Jews, how he deals with not really being one of them, how he is adopted by an idealistic left-wing family, falls in love with a young Israeli girl whose father is a racist, and his ongoing inner-dialogue with his mother still somewhere in a Sudanese refugee camp. Very multi-layered, critical without being moralistic and preachy. Unlike Mr. Mihaileanu's other big movie "The Train of Life" this is not a comedy, but it contains plenty of warmth and humor, and also stars a Shlomo.

The images we see of Ethiopians are often those of children with distended bellies clinging to life as a Western television announcer comments about their depressing fate. No one, however, speaks for the children. Winner of the Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, Radu Mihaileanu's Live and Become gives words to people whose voices have been silent. The film tells the story of Ethiopian Black Jews known as Falashas who were brought to Israel in Operation Moses in 1984 by the Israeli Mossad. It was an operation that successfully airlifted 8,000 Ethiopean Jews to Israel, but sadly also one in which 4,000 died during a brutal journey on foot to Sudan or later in refugee camps.

Mihaileanu (Train of Life) was born in Bucharest, Romania to Jewish parents who had spent time in the Nazi labor camps. In 1980, like the film's protagonist, he was torn from his parents when he fled the dictatorship of Ciaucescu to move to Israel and later to France. In Live and Become, a boy clinging to his mother in the Sudan is told by her to "go, live and become". She tells him that he must pretend to be a Jew and instructs him to remember that his name is Solomon, his father's name was Isaac, and his sister's name was Aster. The film spans fifteen years in the life of young Solomon (called Schlomo by the Israelis), describing his experiences of being alone into a foreign country that speaks a language he doesn't understand and filled with people of a different religion and a different color. Mihaileanu crams a great deal into the film's 142-minute length and it often seems cluttered, yet we can listen and understand its heart and the clear voice in which it speaks to us.

As he reaches Tel-Aviv, Schlomo begins the long processes of absorption and integration into Israeli society but the barriers engendered by social and cultural differences prove difficult to bear. He angrily acts out his frustration in a boarding school in Tel Aviv and is sent for adoption to a left-wing French Sephardic family, Yoram and Yaël Harrari (Roschdy Zem and Yaël Abecassis), who already have two children. They are a close-knit, warm and loving family but face many problems with the boy they did not anticipate. Yael must fight the prejudice of parents in the school who want to withdraw their children from school because they think, coming from Africa, he must be a carrier of disease.

At first refusing to eat, he makes an effort to fit in but hears over and over that because he is black he is not really a Jew. A battle erupts within Israel between fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews over the premise of a black Jew and Schlomo is caught in the middle. Afraid of being discovered as a Christian, the boy immerses himself in Jewish theology, learns Hebrew and French and studies the Torah, yet he carries the burden of his lie around with him. The story then jumps ahead a few years. As a good-looking teenager (Moshe Abebe) Schlomo meets Sarah (Roni Hadar), a white girl he likes but must contend with the virulent racism of her father. Rebelling against the authority of his surrogate parents, the boy is sent to a kibbutz to work and study but maintains a correspondence with Sarah.

As Schlomo (Sirak M. Sabahat as an adult) grows into adulthood and takes responsibility for his guilt, he feels compelled to confess his inner truth and the film capitalizes on every touch of his personal drama. Live and Become tackles one of the most controversial subjects in Israel, that of Jewish identity and racial purity. While it does not hesitate to show the ugly side of Israeli life, it also embraces its humor, sensitivity, and compassion. Although unfortunately the film occasionally slips into cliché, Live and Become works because it is about more than the experience of one person. It tells a universal story of alienation, wanting to belong, and the pain of feeling alone, feelings shared by people of all religions throughout the world.

OK, so i may have some gripes with it artistically, but when you consider the fact that this is one of the first feature films dealing with the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel made by people who actually lived through the experience, those factors become less important. This film has spirit, and that is hard to come by these days. It's imperfections, I think, lie in the fact that this story has been kept under wraps for so long and it was difficult for the filmmakers to know where to begin. It touches on most of the major issues that refugees face in Israel, and is a strong and inspiring beginning to opening up this experience to further filmic treatment. Word has it that the distributors are currently trying to get enough viewer-ship for this film to reach New York and LA, so please support this film! It is an experience not to be missed.

I am an old man and an inveterate cinema-goer since my early youth. I admit that I have been and still am perhaps rather too demanding where films are concerned because, to be honest, out of the innumerable films I have enjoyed throughout the long years of my life, the ones that really succeeded in stunning me as masterpieces which nailed me to my seat from the start of the projection to its very end can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But "Va,vis et deviens" is most certainly one of them in all respects. It aims directly at what is noble in us, and it does so in simple and understandable terms. Pity that the word "excellent" is used so frequently these days, for I now feel the need of yet a stronger adjective to qualify this film.