God's Slave

Patience is a deadly virtue in filmmaker Joel Novoa Schneider's God's Slave, the story of a family man who assumes a double life as a terrorist. In the 1975-set prologue, Lebanese grade-schooler Ahmed witnesses the execution of his father, who believed in peaceful coexistence with his Jewish neighbors. Fifteen years later, Ahmed (Mohammed Alkhaldi) travels to Venezuela and takes on a false identity as Javier, a Catholic doctor. By 1994, he has a wife and child, but is still privately praying to Mecca when he gets the call to come to Argentina. Ahmed is contrasted with David (Vando Villamil), a Mossad officer with a wife and child, who lost his brother to a Palestinian bombing in 1967. In Buenos Aires, Ahmed meets with an Islamic cell to carry out a series of suicide attacks, while David keeps an eye on the terrorists in his jurisdiction, including the man who recruited Ahmed. But things take an unexpected turn once Ahmed springs into action. A deliberately paced film that feels more like a docudrama than a political thriller, this cat-and-mouse tale is based on actual events. Recommended. (K. Fennessy)