Live and Become
Va, vis, et deviens
dir. Radu Mihaileanu
France / Israel, 2004 - 143
During the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980’s, Israel and the United States helped transport to Israel several thousand Ethiopian Jews known as “Falashas”. The protagonist is a “goy” who pretends to be a Jew so as to avoid dying of hunger. The boy manages to get to the Holy Land, where he pretends to be an orphan and is adopted by a family of Sephardic Jews. He grows up in Tel Aviv, living in constant fear of being exposed as a liar on two counts: for he is neither Jew nor orphan, but just an African boy.
As the film’s director comments, “This child growing up is, in my view, a child of our century. He compromises with the jolts of history. During the Second World War, the same lie that saved his life in the year 1984 would no doubt have brought about his death.”
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