Identity Crisis

Ethiopian boy's life in Israel gets epic film treatment

Michael Fox Special to the Jewish Times

Live And Become," Radu Mihaileanu's gripping saga of an Ethiopian boy who gets a fresh start in Israel, spans two decades and three countries. Yet this is an unusually intimate film epic, with the youngster's emotional state always taking precedence over the social and political context. More than four years after its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and two years after a spin on the Jewish film festival circuit, "Live And Become" is finally coming out on DVD April 7.The Passover season release date was no doubt carefully chosen for this latter-day Exodus story.

The movie's depiction of survival, perseverance, adaptation and prejudice froman immigrant's point of viewis, if anything, more relevant now than ever.

The film begins in a Sudanese refugee camp in 1984, where thousands of famished and exhausted Ethiopians are clustered in a kind of hellish limbo.

One smart mother recognizes that the Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews, dubbed "Operation Moses," is the only chance for her young son to have a shot at a decent life, and she persuades a Jewish woman to take him with her and pass him off as her child.

Her succinct goodbye-"Live and become"-is both a blessing and a command. The son, Shlomo, is too young to fully grasp either meaning, but takes it to heart nonetheless.

Once in Israel, he is adopted by a kind and loving left-wing Mizrachi family.

Shlomo has landed in as ideal a situation as one could hope for, but it takes hima while to acclimate and accept it.

The catch is that he knows that he is living a lie and passing as Jewish.

And if that isn't a sufficiently large enough secret for a youngster to have to preserve, he's also torn between his Ethiopian identity-and the desire to somehow remain connected to his birth mother-and his daily life as a member of Israeli society.

While Shlomo can't tell anyone the truth about his non-Jewishness, he does find a friend and mentor in a grandfatherly Ethiopian spiritual leader who helps him compose letters to his mother and remain tied to his Ethiopian identity.

But the questions of who he is and where he belongs never disappear as Shlomo grows up. The viewer can't help but pull for this charming, intelligent and likable adolescent with the proverbial bright future, even as we worry about the cloud over his head.

It's hardly surprising that our sympathies are always with Shlomo, for he represents a human being plucked from the abyss of abject poverty, limited options and premature death. Furthermore, he's the quintessential innocent, with no control over the larger forces that determined, and then miraculously revised, his destiny.

The paradox is that Jewish viewers, who presumably support Israel, will have no trouble rooting for Shlomo to triumph over whatever institutional hurdles he encounters. The film doesn't attack the policies of the Israeli government per se, but contrasts the struggles of the individual against a faceless bureaucracy.

Mr. Mihaileanu, a Jewish, Romanianborn French screenwriter and director best known for 1998's "Train Of Life," recognizes that his character's fictional journey to adulthood is terrifically compelling and doesn't resort to histrionic melodrama to hold our interest or manipulate our emotions.

Well, not until the last reel, when Shlomo has to confront, once and for all, the ramifications of his secret; but by and large, Mr. Mihaileanu simply lets the story unfold naturally, pulling us in deeper.

While "Live And Become" provides some insights into modern Israel, it transcends its location and specificity to address the hopes and difficulties that refugees and immigrants face everywhere.

The film takes the experience of a young man who is unique and adroitly makes that experience accessible and universal.

Most movies purport to take audiences on a journey. "Live And Become" truly does. _ Distributed by Menemsha Films, "Live And Become" stars Moshe Agazai, Moshe Abebe, Sirak M. Sabahat and Yael Abecassis.