Every documentary has to define its scope, and Refusenik is reasonably successful within its own parameters.

 A Refusenik is someone who was denied exit papers to emigrate from the Soviet Union, literally a person who was refused the right to leave the country. The consequences of being a refusenik could be severe: the person lost their job (in a country where it was illegal to be unemployed) and was socially ostracized, and could be jailed on trumped-up charges or incarcerated indefinitely in a mental institution. Many but not all refuseniks were Jews who had suffered discrimination for hundreds of years in Russia and saw anti-Semitism codified into official policy after the Russian Revolution.

The plight of the refuseniks (and of Soviet dissidents in general) was a news staple from the 1970s until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. People needing a refresher course can catch up by watching Refusenik by Laura Bialis, a conventional but generally well-made documentary about Jewish refuseniks, with great attention to the somewhat unlikely story of how they became a popular political cause in the United States.

This is a story with many hooks: the Cold War, political horse-trading, Soviet atrocities, grassroots politics, and the conflict between national sovereignty and universal human rights. Given the potential of the material, it's a shame that Refusnik is frequently such a dull movie. Bialis constructs her film in a straightforward manner, using a combination of talking head interviews and archival footage, including clips from home movies smuggled out of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, she shows little interest in probing beyond the surface and accepts her subjects at face value, with the result that Refusenik verges on becoming a propaganda piece about the brave Soviet Jews. The film's conclusion, a montage accompanied by heart-tugging music, takes this tendency to its furthest extreme.

There's no question that the refuseniks interviewed suffered under the Soviet Regime, but that's no reason to turn them into plaster saints; human beings with both virtues and flaws are much more interesting. You would never guess from this film, for instance, that Natan Sharansky, a refusenik who spent nine years in the Soviet gulag, is now an Israeli hawk justly criticized for his advocacy of democracy and human rights everywhere but within his adopted country. Neither would you have any clue, beyond one brief statement by one interviewee, that people other than Jews were denied exit visas from the Soviet Union.

Bialis deliberately avoids delving into complex issues such as how many refuseniks were seeking a more comfortable material life rather than religious freedom, and how much of Israel's decision to accept large number of émigrés was based on the need to increase the Jewish population in response to a much higher birthrates among Palestinians.

But every documentary has to define its scope, and Refusenik is reasonably successful within its own parameters. The best part of the film is not the repetitive stories of the individual refuseniks (many capped by tearful scenes at airports), but Bialis's exploration of how the refusenik issue grew in America from an obscure cause embraced by students already involved in the Civil Rights movement to an issue embraced by mainstream American Jewry and political leaders. | Sarah Boslaugh

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