Canada,
1983, 80 min
Shown in 1984
CREDITS
- dir
-
Simcha Jacobovici
- prod
-
Simcha Jacobovici, Jamie Boyd
- scr
-
Simcha Jacobovici
- cam
-
Martin Duckworth, Peter Raymont
- editor
-
Roger Pyke
- gga award
-
Mention of Merit, Film & Video
OTHER
Falashas are exiles in their native Ethiopia. Synagogues bear padlocks, rabbis face arrest and escapees risk capture and torture. In his controversial documentary, Simcha Jacobovici exposes the impoverishment and persecution of Ethiopia's Jewish population (about 20,000), an issue heretofore veiled in a policy of silence. Ethiopia's Marxist military rulers have, even more than Emperor Haile Selassie, systematically attempted to deny the religious self-determination which has been theirs for two thousand years. Junta proponents term their faith as quaint, a bad habit. Peasant organizations perpetuate indigent conditions by denying the Falashas land to which they are entitled. Those reaching camps in bordering Sudan face hunger, disease and reprisal from other refugees who call the Falashas sorcerers. Forty years after the Holocaust, backs are turned on a desperate condition. Jacobovici, an Israeli-born journalist, makes a compellingly urgent case for these people. An assemblage of stills, archival and surreptitiously shot footage and interviews expressing divergent opinions crystallize into a statement of outrage. The fact is that these Jews are black and poor and are also from a nation of primary geopolitical importance to Israel and the American Jewish constituency. Most movingly convincing are testimonies by the Black Jews themselves. acobovici and his crew have taken risks to bring the Falasha's plight to light and compel the Israeli government to action.
—Laura Thielen
FACTOID #304
After its U.S. premiere at the 1969 Festival, the print of Z by Costa-Gavras was stolen from the locked projection room of the Masonic Auditorium.
