(France, Italy, Belgium, Israel, 2005, 140 min., Hebrew, French, Amharic with English subtitles)
Directed by Radu Mihaileanu.
Our opening night film is an epic story of an Ethiopian boy who flees an African refugee camp and begins a new life in Israel. The boy, Solomon, is the beneficiary of “Operation Moses,” a clandestine airlift orchestrated by the Israeli government that brought 8,000 famine-stricken Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the mid-1980s. In the face of possible starvation, the boy’s Christian mother commands him to pretend that he’s Jewish and so Solomon becomes “Shlomo” and reluctantly leaves his mother behind in Africa. He grows up with a loving Mizrahi family in Tel Aviv burdened by two secrets—that he’s neither Jewish nor an orphan. We follow Shlomo’s journey from childhood into manhood, as he struggles to reconcile the disparate truths of his identity.
