When the Israeli filmmaker Ofer Freiman met Cleofas (Cleo), his wife Anita and their brood of 15 children, they were living on an isolated farm in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The descendants of Sephardi Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity hundreds of years ago, they were drawn back to Judaism after Cleo’s adult daughter traced their ancestral Jewish roots. Until then, they had tacitly identified as Christians, though they had incorporated certain Jewish practices.
Freiman’s fascinating and unusual film, Leaving Paradise, which is now available on the Izzy streaming platform, documents this process through interviews with family members. The film is in Portuguese, with English subtitles, and is mostly set in Villa Barolo, their farm.
In essence, this is a movie about Judaism lost and found. From start to finish, it poses a question that has periodically roiled Israel, a nation of immigration: Who is a Jew?
Usually, the powerful Orthodox rabbinate in Israel settles this question. But in the remote and scenic highlands of Brazil, where corn is grown and cattle are raised in abundance, people like Cleo are free to deal with it on a very personal level.
From Freiman’s perspective, Cleo is a rugged individual and a man who marches to his own drummer. In many respects, he and Anita look and behave like 1960s hippies. Yet Cleo is also a controlling figure who brooks no dissent, judging by a newly married couple’s decision to leave Villa Barolo under duress.
When Freiman arrived at Villa Barolo, Cleo and his family had been there for about five years. They moved from the city to the countryside to establish a commune loosely modelled after an Israeli kibbutz.
Unfortunately, Freiman tells us nothing about Cleo’s or Anita’s life before Villa Barolo. Where did they live? What was Cleo’s occupation? Nor does he thoroughly explore their reasons for uprooting themselves and starting anew. It’s a yawning flaw that Freiman could easily have remedied.
As Cleo acknowledges, he went through hard times at the beginning and almost threw up his hands in despair before adjusting to his new surroundings. These days, Cleo appears to earn a living as a manufacturer of clay pots, but his degree of dependence on this line of work is left unclear. Is he also a farmer? Freiman offers no clues, leaving another gap in the film.
What seems certain is that the family is moving toward Judaism and seriously considering formal conversion.
Ironically, this break with the past may well tear them apart, shattering Cleo’s dream of living in the countryside. As he ponders conversion, his older kids contemplate the possibility of making aliya to Israel and thereby breaking up the family. This clearly worries Cleo.
In pursuit of their potential conversion, Cleo invites a Conservative rabbi from Buenos Aires to visit the farm. He launches into lectures about Jewish rituals, but Cleo looks bored. His attraction to Judaism is solely focused on his interest in the Torah, which Freiman does not fully explain.
The film unfolds over a two-and-a-half-year span, during which one of Cleo’s sons submits to a circumcision, marries, and travels to Israel with his new bride, only to discover that the rabbinate does not recognize their Conservative conversion.
This is a bitter blow, but it does not discourage the newlyweds. They have chosen to be Jewish, and no one, not even rabbis, can alter their affinity with Judaism.
Leaving Paradise omits a lot as it skims over the surface, but it introduces viewers to a family struggling to renew itself profoundly.
