film scene
Yaël Harrari (Yaël Abecassis) embraces her adopted son, Shlomo
(Moshe Agazai), in "Live and Become."
(Photo courtesy of Menemsha Films)

UTSA's Hillel screens film on Ethiopian refugee

By Tim Brownlee
Assistant Director of Public Affairs

(April 21, 2009)--Hillel at UTSA, a Jewish student-faculty group, and the UTSA African-American Association will host a free screening and discussion of the film "Live and Become" from 3:30 to 6 p.m., Wednesday, April 22 in the John Peace Library Building Assembly Room (4.03.08) on the Main Campus. The event is free and open to the public and refreshments will be available.

Ely Kozminsky, UTSA visiting scholar from Ben Gurion University in Israel, will lead a discussion of the film. Kozminksy is a cognitive psychologist who studies approaches to learning in human development, problem solving, literacy and uses of technology in learning.

Winner of 18 audience awards in the United States, the Berlin International Film Festival Audience Award and the Vancouver International Film Festival Audience Award, "Live and Become" is a story spanning two decades and three countries about an Ethiopian boy who is airlifted from a Sudanese refugee camp to Israel in 1984 during Operation Moses. The boy, Shlomo, is plagued by two big secrets: He is neither a Jew nor an orphan, but just an African boy who survived and wants to fulfill his Ethiopian mother's parting request that he "go, live and become."

Buoyed by a profound and unfaltering motherly love -- both in his memory and in the arms of his adoptive mother in Israel -- he ultimately finds an identity and a happiness all his own.

For more information, contact Rosalind Horowitz, UTSA professor of discourse and literacy studies and founder-director of Hillel, at (210) 458-2008 or 458-2672.