The magnificent, epic story of an Ethiopian boy who is airlifted from a Sudanese refugee camp to Israel in 1984 during Operation Moses. Shlomo is plagued by two big secrets: He is neither a Jew nor an orphan, just an African boy who survived and wants, somehow, to fulfill his Ethiopian mother’s parting request that he “go, live, and become.” With this powerful film, Radu Mihaileanu ambitiously tackles themes of identity and love as reflected in the racial, social, political, and religious problems of immigration and assimilation.
Radu Mihaileanu
Born and raised in Bucharest, Romania, director Radu Mihăileanu (1958) trained at the Institute for Advanced Cinematic Studies in Paris. His first film, Trahir was released in 1993, and dealt with the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He followed this with the highly acclaimed Train of Life (1998), which told of an Eastern European village idiot who dreams of saving himself and his Jewish neighbors from the concentration camps by constructing a phoney deportation by train. Also known for The Concert (2009), which dealt with aspects of Jewish history, through the story of a former conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra who is fired for hiring Jewish musicians at the time of an anti-Semitic purge, and later seeks a chance to rebuild his career. Mihăileanu’s 2011 film, The Source the story of a village sex strike inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
In addition to his work in the cinema he published a book of poems in 1987 titled Une vague en mal de mer.