I, Dalio

The Dual Identities of French-Jewish Actor Marcel Dalio

The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, had the lead role in Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game", and also appeared in Renoir's "Grand Illusion". In both films he played a character who was Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he acted in during the 30s, he almost always played shady Jewish characters --informers, blackmailers, gangsters.

When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Dialo fled to America and appeared in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. He became, in dozens of films, America's idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities, a French man and a Jewish man.

This documentary asks, are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you?