Live and Become

Radu Mihaileanu chronicles the tumultuous journey to adulthood of a Christian Ethiopian child after his desperate mother sneaks him onto a 1985 airlift ferrying thousands of Falasha—Ethiopian Jews—to the relative safety and comfort of Israel. Stripped of his name, language, religion and family, nine-year-old “Shlomo” is adopted by a secular Jewish family and grows up searching for his place in a world where appearances are everything. Though most effective in the scenes depicting Shlomo’s displaced childhood, the film builds to an emotional conclusion whose uplift is tempered by subtle ambiguity.