Va, Vis et Deviens

Go, Live and Become...

That is the movie that I saw last night with Liam at the UQ Schneoll Theatre. The movie starts in the early 1980s in Sudan.

The movie begins in 1985 when Mossad, with considerable assistance from the United States, ran the clandestine Operation Moses to airlift thousands of starved and persecuted Ethiopian Jews to Israel from refugee camps across the border in Sudan. These dark-skinned 'indelible immigrants', to use a term coined by historian Daniel Boorstin, known as the Falasha, are still not fully assimilated into Israeli society. The nine-year-old hero and his widowed Christian mother, last survivors of a family destroyed by famine and war, are at the same camp. When the small son of a Falasha widow dies shortly after being accepted for transportation, she agrees to take the Gentile boy in his place and she gives him the name Solomon, or Schlomo.

His mother bids him farewell with the words that gives the film its title: 'Go. Live. Become.' 'Go' is the urgent instruction to find security in Israel. 'Live' is her counsel to seize a sudden chance to survive and prosper. 'Become' is more problematic, and the movie is constantly alert to what it means in a world of emigration and immigration, asylum seeking and economic migration, where identities are assumed, imposed, blurred and recreated.

The opening section is full of suspense and danger. Can Schlomo convince the Israeli authorities that he's a Jew? Immediately before his interrogation on Israeli soil, a boy a few years older has his cover blown and is roughly escorted from the reception hall, shoved into a car and driven away to be repatriated. Schlomo gets by, but his ailing surrogate mother dies. He's adopted by a kindly Sephardic Franco-Israeli couple, extremely well played by French actor Roschdy Zem and celebrated Israeli actress Yael Abecassis.

These foster-parents, left-wing, semi-secular Jews who initially think the newcomer has been raised in the orthodox faith, draw the boy out and encourage their son and daughter to make him welcome. They represent much of what is best in the state of Israel and protect him from the prejudice, some of it truly ferocious, to which the Falasha are exposed.

The years pass, Schlomo takes on a new identity, has a Romeo and Juliet-style love affair with a Jewish girl, works on a kibbutz, experiences the tensions engendered by the Gulf War and the intifadas and, as part of his journey of discovery, attempts to contact his mother. The years Schlomo spends studying medicine in Paris, when he becomes aware of how he might transcend his problems and give practical assistance to his native Ethiopia.

The last scene of the movie is that he is at the same refugee camp and whilst he was handing out pens to kids, he sees this face half-covered by a shawl. He drops whatever he was holding and walks towards the seated figure, gazing into her eyes. He recognises his mother's eyes, squats down and calls to her. They hug and his mother then lets out this haunting moan.

It was an awesome film...go and watch it.