Not really the films fault. For some reason I believed that the Israeli/Ethiopian/France/Falashan movie Live And Become was only ninety minutes long. Which means at nineties minutes, when the film leaps from the eight year old actor playing the lead to the thirteen year old, I believed this was just a nice little coda to a thought provoking piece of history I knew nothing about. And then he gets himself a girlfriend and it does not feel like it is going to end. And then an eighteen year old version of the character rocks up, and I am looking at my watch with despair.
Luckily the plot points in the last half hour (Schlomo goes to France, becomes a doctor, joins the Israeli army, gets married, has a baby finds his mother) is rattled through at a breathless pace otherwise I could still be there now. And what I said above still applies, it is a good exploration of racism in Israel, and a thorough overview of Operation Moses. It is also however saddled with characters who are far too saintly in the central role. In the middle section this is realised and so the film makes certain roles act wildly out of character, and back again for no good reason. And it is clearly leading from its French perspective (a film which bounces between French, Amharic and Hebrew for its languages often does not translate half the languages). Good, but remember, it is two and a half hours long.