Filmmaker Lorraine Lévy likes to tread lightly wherever she goes. Her aversion to intrusiveness affects the way she looks at the world, and defines her approach to filmmaking. It's certainly a significant part of "Le Fils de l'Autre (The Other Son)," Lévy's latest film (and arguably her most successful), which won both best director and the Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival last year.
"I felt very fortunate," Lévy tells The Japan Times. "And I was more than a little surprised, because the story has no Japanese components, and politically there's nothing that the Japanese will identify with. But I got the feeling that the Japanese are like that: They have a very deep compassion for others."
"Le Fils de l'Autre," released in Japan as "Mo Hitori no Musuko," is a tale of two babies, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who were accidentally switched at birth during a Gulf War bombing. Eighteen years later, the respective parents in Tel Aviv and the West Bank discover what happened. And instead of giving way to tension, grudges and historical antagonism, they and their boys — Joseph (Jules Sitruk) in Israel and Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi) on the West Bank — decide to come together, gradually but with genuine warmth.