It’s hard to believe that a facial expression could have inspired a six-year film project, but that’s exactly how it happened.

Just ask Karen Levin.

In 2006, Levin, who heads a private family foundation headquartered in Centerville, was on a humanitarian and fact-finding mission to learn about the plight of Ethiopian Jews who dreamed of returning to Jerusalem. On her last night in Gondar, Ethiopia, she recognized a familiar look on the faces of family members who were being separated from one another. Those who had received permission to leave were boarding the planes for Israel while other members of their families were left behind to await their final immigration papers.

It’s the same look, Levin said, that she had seen on the face of her grandfather when he talked about fleeing Russia as a boy— knowing he could never contact or see his family again.

“As he spoke, a very strange and pained look came across his face,” said Levin, who was only 7 years old when her grandfather revealed his story to her. At a time when the Bolshevik Army was taking all young boys, her grandfather determined to flee but was unable to tell his family members he was leaving.

They would have been killed if they had known his plans but not reported them to the authorities, Levin explained.

Although she’d had no experience with film-making, Levin returned to Dayton determined to find a meaningful way to tell the heart-breaking but inspiring story of the people she had met in Ethiopia.

The lesson she’d learned, she said, is that although immigration and naturalization are wonderful things, there are always trade-offs.

That was even true, she believes, for those like her grandfather or the Ethiopian Jews who were leaving a less desirable place and coming to a new home that was far more accommodating.

When Levin returned to Dayton, she asked her friends, musicians Michael and Sandy Bashaw, to recommend someone who could help tell the story. They suggested Yellow Springs journalist Aileen LeBlanc.

“As a storyteller, I like a film that doesn’t answer everything for me,” LeBlanc said. “The stories I choose are those that don’t have answers.”

That’s certainly the case with “Take Us Home.” The project has taken six years and has encountered a variety of obstacles, but Miami Valley audiences will see the results on Thursday night, Nov. 15, when the Dayton Art Institute hosts the Miami Valley premiere of the 70-minute documentary.

An Ethiopian father and son prominently featured in the film are being flown to Dayton for the premiere. So is co-director Orly Malessa, an Ethiopian-born Israeli who made the journey through the Sudan by foot when she immigrated to Israel many years ago. She also served as a translator on location.

The event begins with a reception, and a Q&A with film-makers will follow the screening. The special guests and an excerpt from the film also will be part of the Miami Valley Forum on Immigration at the University of Dayton on Friday, Nov. 16.

Though the Levin Family Foundation provided major funding for the film, it was not involved with content or production decisions. Those challenges were solely the responsibility of LeBlanc, who had also been recommended by renowned documentary film-makers Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar.

LeBlanc, who began her career in theater and broadcasting, is best known to audiences in the Miami Valley as the host of “Sounds Local,” the popular WYSO radio program that covered topics in the Miami Valley ranging from the arts to education. She served as news director at WYSO and WHQR, and her national work has been featured on NPR, Voice of America, BBC, Monitor Radio, Pacifica and the CBC. Her first film, “Dayton Code Breakers,” came out in 2005.

Though LeBlanc knew nothing about the plight of Ethiopian Jews, the project intrigued her.

“When you’re a journalist, you get to learn everything about something new all the time,” said LeBlanc, who had never been to either Ethiopia or Israel. “I had no idea there were Ethiopian Jews, and I’m not Jewish and didn’t known much about ancient forms of Judaism.”

But when she began doing research, she realized the underlying story of the Ethiopians was universal.

“It’s really about immigrants and acceptance; about leaving home and putting on a new culture,” she explained. “But in this case, there are several complicating factors.”

One of those “factors” is Israel’s Law of Return, a policy that allows any Jew in the world to be welcomed as an Israeli citizen and resettled by the government. Estimates are that each immigrant will cost the government a minimum of $100,000 over their lifetime.

Was an Ethiopian — whose ancestors were Jewish but whose family had converted to Christianity centuries ago — still considered a Jew if he or she was now practicing Judaism and longing to return to Jerusalem?

It’s one of the many issues LeBlanc, who also is the film’s narrator, explores in the film.

“There were many reasons the Ethiopian Jews converted,” she said. “It was never easy to be Jewish in Ethiopia. You’re not looked on as being like the rest of the people. Their Christian neighbors believed Jews could turn into hyenas and make them sick. I interviewed somebody recently who said they still believe that.”

Other issues involve interminable waits in refugee camps for many who have already sold their land and their animals and come to Gondar expecting to leave for Israel immediately. The wait for immigration papers can take years.

“For one family, it was a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ where a family has to decide whether to stay with their adopted son in Ethiopia where they are all living in poverty or leave him in Ethiopia,” LeBlanc said.

She also explores the adjustment for those who realize the dream and discover that Israel is not the land of milk and honey they’d envisioned, she said.

“They look at Jerusalem as the answer to all their problems, but there are new problems in their new land,” she said.

Among those are the dramatic cultural adjustments.

“In four hours on a plane, they travel 2,000 years in time and end up in Israel — a high-tech place,” LeBlanc said. “They’ve been living as a family on a mud floor in Ethiopia — they didn’t have doorknobs, they didn’t know what living upstairs meant, didn’t know how to turn on a gas stove, hadn’t been on elevators … all new to them.”

In one humorous scene in the film, an Ethiopian flips up the lid on his new toilet, peeks inside and jokes that in his native land, the bowl would have been used to mix dough.

LeBlanc, who started shooting in February 2007, made five trips to Ethiopia and Israel. She also filmed in New York. She says she always begins her projects with the music. In this case, she enlisted her friends, the Bashaws.

“Our aim was to match the mood of the music to what was happening in the film,” Sandy Bashaw explained. “We would talk to Aileen about each section and then create music we felt was appropriate.”

The couple listened to CDs of ethnic music that LeBlanc brought from Ethiopia.

“We wanted to match the sound or tonal quality of the ethnic instruments, and we wanted to be able to reference the musical scales of the ethnic melodies,” Michael Bashaw explained. “In addition, we incorporated Hebrew scales in some of the pieces.”

Instruments heard on the “Take Us Home” soundtrack include flutes, guitar, ukulele, dumbek, shakers and other hand percussion and giant kalimas (the sound sculptures for which the Bashaws are known.)

The film crew faced challenges at every step along the way. The amount of equipment typically used on this type of shoot couldn’t be used, for example, because it was both too expensive and too heavy to fit on the little planes. It took two days with a driver and land rover to get to Gondar.

“You really have no idea how expensive it will be or how how long it will take,” said LeBlanc, who says in Ethiopia they were dealing with people who didn’t speak their language and laws that didn’t pertain to the Western world.

“I told Karen the first day we met that everything will go wrong — and we just need to pray they all didn’t all go wrong in the same week,” LeBlanc said. ” I was right, and sometimes it did all go wrong in the same week — both technically and in every other way. We were stalled for over a year because of funding, and that’s very typical of those trying to make an independent film. We had to get funding for each shoot.”

LeBlanc, who is hoping the film will be televised on PBS, says although the work was terribly hard and frustrating, she fell in love with Ethiopia and the people there.

“We tend to put people in categories and make judgements without knowing how much they are like us. When it comes to issues of immigration, we think of people as being ‘the other.’

“They’re just like us,” she said. “They are worried about the same things we’re worried about — the health and education of their children, making dinner, getting along, helping their neighbors. Just like us, they just want a fair shot.”