Producers of documentary about Ethiopian aliyah consider next steps

By Marc Katz, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

Even though the locally-produced documentary Take Us Home is a little past its film circuit prime, it continues to have a shelf life as producer and director Aileen LeBlanc and Dayton’s Levin Family Foundation, the film’s primary sponsor, work to push it further.

The documentary about the Falash Mura — Ethiopians of Jewish descent, who attempt to make aliyah (immigrate to Israel) — was filmed on location and edited in the Dayton area, where LeBlanc lived at the time; it has won awards but not commercial success.

“When people think you’re making movies, they think you’re making money,” said LeBlanc, who worked at WYSO in Yellow Springs when she made the film, but now is at station KMUW operated by Wichita State University in Kansas.

“Documentaries don’t make money. Usually, they are a labor of love and very painful. Once you get your film done, which is hard and long, then it’s like, ‘What do you do with it?’ And that’s where we are now with Take Us Home.”

Since its world premiere at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival in June 2012, the movie has won some awards — including the Van Gogh Film Editing Award for World Cinema Documentary from the 2012 Amsterdam Film Festival and Best Documentary at the 2014 Texas Black Film Festival. It has also screened at film festivals in Dallas, San Diego, Palm Beach, Nashville, Louisville, Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, and has a request from Chicago for a showing there.

It’s been shown in classrooms — including colleges — and has been pitched for public television, though Karen Levin, executive director of the Levin Family Foundation, said the film would have to be cut 15-20 minutes to fit a television format.

“My goal is to get it to Israel,” Levin said. “There are still thousands of people left behind (in Ethiopia). Every time a group sees it, it’s one more group of people who find out about a population they had no idea about.

“It’s the same thing that happened to our grandparents (in Europe), that happened to these Ethiopians. It’s just their skin color is different. This is a film about history and it will never go out of style.”

LeBlanc isn’t sure where the film will resurface, or who will find favor in it. Expecting it to be most popular at Jewish film festivals, it has become more popular at black film festivals.

She has also found that most Jewish film festival documentaries today have a Palestinian component that highlights conflict in and around Israel.

“I didn’t see this film as a Jewish film or a black film,” LeBlanc said. “I just saw it as a film.”

LeBlanc, working at a new job, has not pushed the movie as much lately, but she did say, “it still seems to have a life of its own. It’s doing pretty well.

“It’s about people. I think it could have a longer life (than usual for a documentary of this type). The University of Dayton brought me back for a screening a couple of months ago (in November). A class used it for a project for the semester. It was important for us to have an educational component from the beginning.”

To Levin, her interest never changed. “The purpose of this was never ‘to make money,’” she said. “The purpose was to tell a history story. I can report to you Worku, who is one of the featured boys in the film, is in computer training in the Israeli military and is being considered to become an officer. He is doing excellent.”

Unfortunately, most Ethiopians haven’t thrived in Israel. And the Jewish state significantly slowed down aliyah for Falash Mura last year. Until their rescue and absorption, Take Us Home will continue to tell the story.

To read the complete May 2014 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.