Film Synopsis
FOUR HUNDRED MILES TO FREEDOM (working title) is the story of co-director Avishai Mekonen’s search to remember and reconcile what happened to him at age 10 in 1984, when he was kidnapped by slave traffickers in Sudan. Throughout his life-long journey from Ethiopia to Sudan, Israel, and finally America, his fundamental identity is challenged: “What does it mean when others insist that you can’t be who you know you are?” His search for answers leads him to other African, Asian and Latino Jews, and together they discover what it takes to heal a broken past and to overcome the invisibility and the questioning of one’s identity.
Production Team
Directed, Produced, Writen, and Edited by: Avishai Mekonen & Shari Rothfarb Mekonen
Executive Producers: Steven Fischler & Joel Sucher, Pacific Street Films
Executive Producers: Gary Tobin & Diane Kaufmann Tobin, Institute for Jewish & Community Research
Directors of Photography: Yahel Herzog, John Miglietta & Daniel Miran
Co-Writer: Scott Rubin
Sound: Yuval Sussler, Nadav Aronowitz
Production Assistants: Shiri Benami, Katsumi Funahashi, John Tricoli
Web Developer: Rob Rothfarb
Advisors
Gary A. Tobin, Ph.D.: President, Institute for Jewish & Community Research(IJCR), S.F.; Director, Jewish Policy Research, University of Judaism , L.A. ; Author, Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism. He is the editor of two volumes on effects of the racial schism in America , What Happened to the Urban Crisis? and Divided Neighborhoods.
Diane Kaufmann Tobin: Assoc. Director, IJCR; Co-author, Study of Ethnic and Racial Diversity in the Jewish Community. Director of Bechol Lashon (In Every Tongue), the initiative on racial and ethnic diversity in the Jewish community.
Scott Rubin: Co-author, In Every Tongue: The Racial & Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People.
Angela Warnick Buchdahl: Rabbi/Cantor, NY.
Rabbi Capers Funnye: Rabbi, Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, Chicago; Boards: Chicago Board of Rabbis, American Jewish Congress.
Lewis Gordon, Ph.D.: Professor of Philosophy & Religion; Director, Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, Temple University . Author, Antiblack Racism, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man and Existentia Africana: Understanding Black Existential Philosophy.
Ephraim Isaac, Ph.D.: Director, Institute of Semitic Studies and Fellow, Butler College , Princeton University , 1994-; Int’l. Chair, Horn of Africa Board of Peace & Development Organization; President, Yemenite Jewish Federation of America . First professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard (1968-1977).
Gershom Sizomu: Spiritual leader, Abayudaya Jews of Uganda; rabbinical student, University of Judaism , L.A.
Rabbi Rigoberto Emmanuel Viñas: Founder, El Centro de Estudios Judios , NY and Torah Tropical, an int’l. Spanish Jewish newspaper. Rabbi, Lincoln Park Jewish Center, NY.
Featured Photographic work by
Aliza Auerbach
Zion Ozeri
Joan Roth
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