Black African boy traumatized by immigrant-hating society.

Mussa, a documentary which screens tonight at Seattle Jewish Film Festival, is about a 12-year-old black African refugee who lives with his family in a poor quarter of Tel Aviv and attends a posh private school, where he must hear other students (who are white) go on about how immigrants are bad people and will make their race impure. These kids are speaking like their parents. The nicer kids say immigrants are good at cleaning kitchens and floors "spic and span." Mussa's response to this constant bombardment is to keep silent. He writes and types in Hebrew, but he will not speak at all. Sadly, this silence does not protect him from the realities of life sans papiers.