little bitty girl

Zozo is a movie about a 10 year old boy who is ripped from his home in war-torn Beirut in 1987. He starts off as normal a boy can be in a war torn zone, playing with his friends and gossiping about girls. That all changes the day his family receives official papers to immigrate to Sweden to reunite with his grandparents. Zozo is sent out on an errand and just barely misses being hit during an attack. His family however, are not so fortunate and Zozo is left to fend for himself.

Then begins the next major journey taken in Zozo's young life. Zozo somehow manages to make his way to Sweden to join his grandparents who decide that the best way to deal with the grief is simply not to talk about it. This part of his journey deals with trying to assimilate into a society where he cannot speak the language and his fellow classmates simply cannot begin to understand the devastation from which he came from.

According to writer-director Josef Faras, this movie is somewhat autobiographical to his very own journey from Beirut to Sweden, other than the fact that he wishes that he wished he was more like Zozo's character. There are some truly touching scenes in this movie - the sheer devastation of the impact of war on families, the wonderfully witty and loving banter between the two grandparents and the realistic portrayal of the difficulty of adjusting to immigrant life from a child's perspective. There are not a lot of movies who can capture the immigrant story well and I think that Mr. Faras did a very admirable job. However, there were many parts of the movie that was disjointed and this movie as a whole, pales in comparison to Josef Faras' brilliant 2001 effort, Jalla! Jalla!