This has been an important theme for his films, especially the award-winning Train of Life. Now he has filmed in Israel, a film of broad scope which focuses on the experience of Falasha refugees from Ethiopia to Israel in the 1980s.
Usually, a review suggests that a film could be shorter. This film, although it runs for 140 minutes, really could be longer, especially in the third and final section. Compared with the satisfying pace of the first part (which comprises half the film), the final part is extremely hurried, suggesting significant events briefly and telegramming developments rather than dramatising them fully.
Live and Become is a very worthy film and crosses all kinds of boundaries, a plea for tolerance and understanding.
The opening of the film gives some basic information about the Falashas, the people of Ethiopia who claim descendence from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the 1980s and 1990s, they suffered persecution from the Ethiopian government and thousands fled the country. Many died on the way to camps in the Sudan. In the mid-80s, the United States, eventually with the help of Israel’s Mossad, airlifted many of them to Israel.
A 9 year old Christian boy is told by his mother to go with another woman and pretend that he is Jewish, Solomon, ‘Schlomo’. The film is very moving, thanks to the performance of Mosche Agazai as the young boy who experiences bewilderment at his mother’s action, confusion in a strange country with different habits for eating, sleeping and clothes, alienation although he learns Hebrew. He is adopted by a couple with two children and begins his road to becoming an Israeli.
There are some tense and funny moments as he is invited to say grace by his adopted parents who are not religious and when he cannot answer questions in rabbinical classes and gives a speech about Jesus.
The second part of the film shows Schlomo as an adolescent. He has become part of his family. A neighbouring girl is in love with him despite her bigoted father. In the third part, Schlomo is a young adult and the important events of his life including telling the truth about himself with the support of the Falasha leader who has been his source of strength for years, going to Paris to study, marrying and returning to Ethiopia to work and to find his mother are sketched very quickly.
The ending is one of those which causes problems where anti-sentimentalist audiences begrudge the happy ending all of us would wish for in real life.
Yael Abecassis, who plays the adoptive mother, was born in Morocco and lives in Israel. Roschdy Zem, on the other hand, is of Arab background living in Paris. The three actors who portray Schlomo are all Ethiopian Jews. Live and Become is truly a work of compassion and an appeal for understanding. Winner of an Ecumenical Award at the Berlin Film Festival, 2005.

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