Switched-at-birth plots have been around for hundreds of years. Lorraine Levy’s 2012 film The Other Son takes that plotline and adds hefty doses of politics, war and ethnic conflict to the mix. It focuses on an Israeli couple and a Palestinian couple who discover that their 18-year-old sons were accidentally switched at birth (a missile attack forced the evacuation of the hospital where both mothers gave birth). How the young men come to terms with their new identities — as well as the parents’ fears about their real sons being raised by ”the other side” — makes this drama like an on-screen onion with many layers to peel away. ”The possibility of such a mix-up happening in real life evokes both fascination and horror and raises stark, primal questions of identity,” writes film reviewer A.O. Scott in The New York Times. ”Is who you are determined by the genetic fingerprints of your biological inheritance or by the influence of your environment?”
Tue., March 12, 7:30 p.m.; Thu., March 14, 5 p.m., 2013
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2012.
