400 Miles to Freedom (post-production)

400 MILES TO FREEDOM is a work-in-progress documentary that chronicles co-director Avishai Mekonen's exploration of what it takes to claim one’s own identity. From Israel to the United States he connects with other Jews of color with similar struggles, and discovers how his community's trek across Africa in 1984—and what happened to him along the way—is part of larger histories of people affected by immigration, war, and diaspora. Through his personal point-of-view, the film tells the dramatic story of his family’s dangerous walk out of Ethiopia, their time in Sudanese refugee camps, and, ultimately, the life-defining event for Avishai of having been kidnapped as a boy by slave traffickers in Sudan.

But as an adult and as a father, he sees that he must face his past. Like many immigrants and their children, his legacy is to both reconcile the trauma of the journey to new countries and learn to balance multiple cultures and identities. Providing a rare view of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) and other Jews of color, the film tells a universal story of overcoming the experience of being branded as 'outsider’ while ultimately affirming one's identity and ties to family, community, and culture.

400 MILES TO FREEDOM provides critical visibility for Jews of color and elevates these diverse, underserved, and underrepresented communities into the general public consciousness. It unravels the misconception that all Jews are white through Avishai’s personal journey and the stories of other Jews of color he meets along the way: African-American Rabbi Capers Funnye, Cuban-American Rabbi Rigoberto Viñas, Korean-American Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl, Ethiopian kessim (rabbis) in Israel, scholars Dr. Lewis Gordon and Dr. Ephraim Isaac, and others. An integral source of conflict in the film also comes when Avishai meets with Chief Ashkanazi Rabbi of Israel Yonah Metzger who controversially claims the Ethiopian Jews need “a little push,” i.e. symbolic conversion, in order to be fully Jewish.

For more information, please visit http://fourhundredmilestofreedom.com.