A new Netflix film that explores the heroic rescue of Ethiopian Jews in the mid-1980s will make its world premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival next week, ahead of its screening by the American streaming giant.
"The Red Sea Diving Resort" is the incredible story of an operation by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, a group of international agents and brave Ethiopians, who in the 1980s used a deserted holiday retreat in Sudan as a front to smuggle thousands of refugees to Israel.
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The movie was written and directed by "Homeland" executive producer Gideon Raff.
It stars Chris Evans ( "Fantastic Four," "The Avengers"), Michael K. Williams ("The Wire"), Haley Bennett ("The Magnificent Seven"), Michiel Huisman ("Orphan Black, "Game of Thrones"), Alessandro Nivola ("American Hustle"), Greg Kinnear ("As Good as It Gets," "House of Cards") and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley.
The movie will premiere on July 28, as the festival's closing night event. It will be released by Netflix on July 31.
Evans plays Ari Levinson, the Mossad agent who leads the mission together with courageous local Kabede Bimro, played by Williams.
"Posed as naive European entrepreneurs, the team Levinson leads take advantage of the Sudanese government's interest in expanding its feeble Ministry of Tourism to purchase a strategically located property along the Red Sea. Their plans are thrown for a loop, however, when real tourists begin arriving, expecting service," the festival's website describes.
"Finding more humor and adventure in the story than one would imagine possible given the high stakes of the drama, what resonates most strongly throughout The Red Sea Diving Resort is an indistinguishable pride in the sense of fraternity between the Israeli and Ethiopian Jews, and the resourcefulness and bravery that bonds them together."
According to the Jewish Press, between 1979 and 1983, Aliyah activists and Mossad agents operating in Sudan encouraged the Beta Israel communities in Ethiopia to come to Sudan, and from Sudan they would be taken to Israel via Europe. Jewish Ethiopian refugees from the Ethiopian Civil War of the mid-1970s began to arrive at the refugee camps in Sudan.
In 1983, the governor of Gondar province in north-western Ethiopia was ousted and his successor removed the restrictions on travel. Beta Israel began to arrive in large numbers, and the Mossad was unable to evacuate them in time. In late 1984, the Sudanese government, under US pressure, allowed 7,200 Beta Israel refugees to leave.
Between November 20, 1984, and January 20, 1985, under Operation Moses, Israel rescued 6,500 Ethiopian Jews and another 494 Beta Israel refugees were flown to Israel by the US Air Force, the report said.
