Just perfect...

Admirable film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This is one of the best films i have ever seen . It was only scheduled for one screening at Van film fest in 2005 but after an email campaign got a second screening, peoples choice award and subsequently general release, still not seen by as many as it deserves. Sublime! It should be part of every schools curriculum. If its the only film you ever see , let this be it. The direction, storytelling , performances are all heart wrenching and uplifting. The fact that i am writing about it 2 years later says something! It restored my faith in cinema and the power it has to change and empower lives. English title is 'Live and Become" Does anyone know if its on DVD or video?

This is an Israel-France co-production, with a Romanian director. It concerns a young Ethiopian boy who goes to Israel in 1984 with Operation Moses, This was a project to rescue the Falasha, a group of black Jews who had lived in Ethiopia for centuries, from famine. Moshe, as he becomes, is not actually Jewish, however. His Christian mother sends him off and tells him not to come back to Africa until he has "become". Before getting on the truck to the airlift he is taken in hand by a Falasha woman whose son has just died. He pretends to be that son and is assisted in this by a friendly doctor who knows about the situation.In Israel his surrogate mother, already sick, soon dies and he is adopted by an Israeli couple, secular left-wing Jews from France. He very quickly learns enough about Judaism to pass as Jewish, and, after an initial difficult period of adjustment wherein he is ostracized, largely because of his race, he finds his way in Israeli society. Gradually Shlomo becomes more accomplished and more integrated in Israeli life. He has an off-and-on relationship with Sarah, an Israeli Jewish girl. Unfortunately, her father, who seems to be quite bigoted against blacks, opposes the relationship, ostensibly on the grounds that Shlomo isn't Jewish enough. To prove that he is, he enters and wins a religious debate on the topic "what color was Adam." He sidesteps the obvious black/white question by declaring that Adam was red, like the earth he was made from. He wins the girl's heart, but not the father's.Eventually Shlomo goes to Paris, becomes a doctor, and returns to marry Sarah. He still has the guilty secret that he is not really Jewish, and finally reveals it when his wife tells him that she is pregnant. She is very upset, not because he isn't Jewish, but because he kept something from her. Shlomo tells his adoptive mother the truth, and she intercedes with Sarah. She forgives him, but, she says, on one condition. We never hear exactly what that is, but in the next and final scene we find Shlomo working with Medecins sans Frontieres in Africa, where, against all odds, he finds his birth mother, still in a refugee camp.It's a bit too pat, but after what Shlomo has been through, we forgive the filmmakers for this rather Hollywood-style ending.This film won best film award at the Copenhagen festival, and it is easy to see why. While it deals with the very particular situation of the Falasha in Israel, it addresses much larger questions of identity and belonging, of prejudice and acceptance, and of the need for recognition of our common humanity. It's not a diatribe against religion: two rabbis show great compassion towards Shlomo while others show their prejudices. Nor is it really about politics: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the background, and so are the civil wars in Africa, but the film is much more about smaller, everyday interactions where people show their true selves. I don't think a brief description can do justice to this film: it should be seen.

To Whom It May Concern: I was very moved by Live and Become. I am happy a film like this has been made, especially because it allows non-Ethiopian Israelis and non-Israeli Jews to get a glimpse into the reality of an Ethiopian immigrant's experience.Despite the wonderful qualities of Live and Become, I feel compelled to voice a complaint about the film. A film like this has great power – it has won countless awards and been viewed by millions of people around the world. The film presents itself as being factual and contemporary. For these reasons, I feel that you have a moral obligation to maintain your 'factual' and 'contemporary' agenda across the board – both for the Ethiopian experience as well as for Israel the state. You can be fictional or accurate with both or neither, but you can't pass yourself off as being true to the one, and be completely inaccurate with the other.Examples: 1) As the Ethiopian immigrants enter Israel, someone says "All the Jews in Israel are white". Including a line like this in your film makes you morally culpable in reinforcing false stereotypes about Israel. Israel has enough unjust PR against it, framing the conflict as the "colonizing white Europeans" versus the "dark-skinned, indigenous Palestinians", which makes it all too easy for the uneducated majority to take a side. If you have an opportunity to factually educate the public, why did you choose instead to maintain ignorance? Over 30% of Israelis, throughout history, have been born and raised in the Middle East (Israel and surrounding Arab countries), the Mediterranean, and Africa. Nobody talks about that fact.2) In the scene where Schlomo asks his grandfather about a just solution to the conflict, I understand your intent is to portray the French family as liberal and left-wing. But there are ways to portray those political views without again reinforcing gravely mistaken misunderstandings about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The comparison of a newly planted tree to Israel and an old tree to Palestine is outrageous – Jews have been living in the land of Israel, continuously, for over two thousand years. Unfortunately, more people these days watch movies than read books. So the audience you've reached with your film will more likely base their opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict from the message you've presented, rather than doing their own research on Jewish presence in the land of Israel over history. For this reason, you are guilty of furthering misinformation and hostility against Israel – you have rejected, rather than seized, an opportunity to help the peace process.Given the very factual, and very contemporary, suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians, you have committed a grave mis-service to everyone involved with your misleading messages. The least you could do is remedy these scenes, and make a public statement recognizing the true constitution of Israel's population and history in the land.

I am amazed by the fact that this film did not get more advertising exposure. Perhaps, it is because it surrounds a theme particularly interesting if one is Jewish and even then the plight of the Falasha or black Ethiopian Jews is little known among the general Jewish population. Despite that, there is, I think, much in this film to which everyone can relate. It captured my soul and I was emotionally enmeshed in it. A black Christian Ethiopian young boy in a Sudanese refugee camp, because of the urging of his mother, pretends to be Jewish to get to Israel to escape the horrendous conditions he is in. It surrounds a dire conflict in Sudan which took place in the 1980's and the Israeli Operation Moses rescue which air-lifted those Ethiopian Jews caught in the middle of that struggle and brought them to Israel. It could, however, certainly be the Sudan that exists today, Iraq or anywhere the brutality of warfare occurs and the innocents who are swept up, enveloped, brutalized and killed by it. It centers around concepts of racism and man's inhumanity to man. It is also about love -- especially a mother's love for her child, a stranger's love and a love between two people which transcends race.For those who are Jewish, I think, it is an especially poignant film as it is about what it means to be a Jew, who is Jewish and how that is determined. It reflects the diversity in Israel itself about those core, ever-present and debatable issues which determine Israeli citizenship. It is about the plight of the Falasha or Ethiopian black Jews in Israel who are refugees and allowed entry into Israel solely based on their being Jewish. Sometimes, the larger Jewish populous who consider themselves white have ambivalent and less-than-welcoming feelings about the Falasha. Clearly, worldwide, being a Jew is more than being religious and this work points that out insightfully and with pathos. I have no criticism of the movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it.