Don’t miss the film, The Other Son!
What happens to two families, one Jewish, one Palestinian, when their infant sons get mixed up at the hospital and they end up raising the “son of the other” instead of their own biological son? That’s the plot in “Le Fils de L’Autre” (literally, The Son of the Other) a French film directed by Lorraine Lévy, whose title got translated into English, “The Other Son.”
The French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote “L’enfer, c’est l’autre.” (Hell is the other.) Titling the film “The Other Son” thus does not convey the dark tension in this film. The agony for both families is that the young man whom they have loved since birth, the son they have raised as their own, is in fact the son of the other, that other who, because of the fairly recent conflicts in a territory once peacefully inhabited by Jews and Palestinians, is now regarded as enemy, an agent of evil, perhaps even an interloper from hell.
In The Other Son one sees how territorial conflicts infect life at the personal level. The film is fiction, but fiction often bespeaks truths not graspable via facts and figures. Will these two families find a way to love the son of the other as their own, and welcome to their bosom their own son, raised by the other? This is the dramatic question so artfully handled in this film about peacemaking within families, which must somehow be undertaken even though political conflicts rage on.
Delaware Pacem in Terris will sponsor a screening of The Other Son at 7:00 p.m. on March 25th at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 1502 W. 13th St., Wilmington, Delaware, 19806; tel: (302) 654-5214. Admission is free, but donations to help cover the cost of renting the film will be much appreciated.
Peace,
— TCDavis