Another Road Home

Jewish filmmaker Danae Elon's revealing documentary, "Another Road Home," began life as her search for the Palestinian man who all but raised her for the first 20 years of her life in Jerusalem. But this isn't a standard reunion story. By looking at the complex relationship between her own family and the family of the loving, selfless man who cared for her, Elon shines a light on Israeli-Palestinian relations in ways that are profound, human and hopeful.

Elon is the daughter of Amos Elon, a celebrated left-wing Israeli author and social critic. But Amos, by his own admission, wasn't particularly good at being a dad. And though the film doesn't spell it out, her mother wasn't around much, either. So Elon was cared for by Mahmoud "Musa" Obeidallah, a Palestinian looking to earn enough money to send his eight sons to the United States, where they could go to school and have a better life.



Having lost touch with Obeidallah, Elon travels to Patterson, N.J., to find the sons. The reunion between the brothers and all-but-in-blood sister is warm but also awkward. "He spent all my growing life in your house," one son, Nasser, tells her. "Did you ever think about us?"



In fact, as "Another Road Home" goes on, it raises more questions than it answers. Elon is comfortable with awkward silences and unspoken tension. She bravely unmasks the contradictions and subtle prejudices in her own behavior as well as that of her parents. (Before meeting Obeidallah's sons, the famously liberal Amos Elon wonders if they've grown beards, meaning: Are they extremists?) She finds a sense of home in the immigrant communities of Patterson.



And of course she finds Obeidallah, a man still comfortable in any social situation, able to somehow skirt the political and see people for simply who they are. When Elon asks her father figure how he could have ironed her Israeli army uniform every morning, he tells her he didn't see the country - he saw the girl he loved.