Israeli movies: A guide for the perplexed - explainer

When Lia van Leer established the Jerusalem Film Festival 41 years ago, she envisioned it as a showcase for Israeli cinematic talent, and the main competitions were all for Israeli movies, not international films. 

As the 41st edition of the festival gets underway – it runs this year from July 18-27 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other venues around the city – it’s worth noting that most of the buzz that surrounds it is still about the Israeli competitions. Israeli film lovers, film festival programmers, and film distributors travel from cities around Israel and all over the world to attend and get a first look at the movies that will take part. 

The festival has launched many of the movies that have represented Israel at the Oscars in recent decades and many more that have won Ophir Awards in multiple categories, during times of both war and peace.

If, in addition to seeing the movies in this year’s Haggiag Competition for Israeli Feature Films at the festival, you would like to take a deep dive into past films, the good news is that it’s easier to do than ever, thanks to the Israel Film Archive’s digitized library at jfc.org.il/en/, available around the world. Some feature films are available free of charge, while most classic Israeli feature films can be streamed for a small fee. Many other streaming services around the world also offer contemporary and classic Israeli films. 

For those who would like to investigate the world of Israeli film but don’t know where to begin, here is some background. To put it in very basic terms, the Israeli movie industry has had two golden ages, with a decade or two of the cinematic equivalent of wandering in the desert in between. 

In the 1950s and early 1960s, many high-profile movies set in Israel were made by Britain or Hollywood and used Israeli history as a backdrop to telling a tale of heroism, such as Thorold Dickinson’s Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955); Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), an adaptation, with Paul Newman, of the Leon Uris bestseller; and Melville Shavelson’s Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), starring Kirk Douglas as real-life American war vet Mickey Marcus, who fought for Israel.

But at the same time, a homegrown Israeli movie industry was coming to life, with two basic streams: earnest dramas and broad comedies, the latter of which were known as sratei bourekas, or “bourekas” movies, named for the greasy, savory pastries sold all over the country. These comedies are beloved by many who watched them as young people, but if you take away the nostalgia component, they are long on shtick and short on substance. Save for a few clips, such as the egg-eating contest in Charlie and a Half, many of these formulaic films are a chore to sit through these days.

A filmmaker of exceptional wit and talent who emerged in the early period was humorist/author/playwright Ephraim Kishon, who directed his own screenplays with the kind of self-assurance that comes along just once or twice in a century. His first movie, Sallah Shabati (1964), is perhaps the ultimate Israeli film of all time. The story of a naïve Mizrahi immigrant played by Chaim Topol, who wises up fast, it makes fun of everyone and everything in Israel, with affection, playfulness, and sometimes a touch of anger.

When I was teaching film history at the campus of an American university in Tel Aviv, I told my students that if they learned enough to understand every joke in that movie, they would know just about everything there is to know about modern Israel because nothing really changes. And even if they didn’t, they’d still enjoy the movie because you don’t need to know absolutely everything to appreciate the comedy and drama.

Sallah Shabati was nominated for what was then known as a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (now the category is Best International Feature), Israel’s first nomination in this category. Kishon made a number of other phenomenally popular movies, notably The Policeman (1971), which was also nominated for an Oscar.

It starred Shaike Ophir, for whom the Ophir Awards were named, as a bumbling but pure-hearted policeman everyone takes advantage of. Kishon’s 1969 movie, The Big Dig, perhaps the most prescient Israeli movie of all time, tells the story of a lunatic obsessed with drilling holes in streets. When he escapes from his asylum, steals a drill, and wreaks havoc all over Tel Aviv, everyone just assumes it’s a typical lack of municipal planning. 

Another important filmmaker of that period was Moshe Mizrahi. He made I Love You Rosa (1972), about a boy expected to fulfill an ancient religious law and marry his brother’s widow (Michal Bat Adam) in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 20th century; and The House on Chelouche Street (1973), about a sensitive teen from an Egyptian immigrant family in the 1940s, who defies his widowed mother (Gila Almagor) and gets caught up in the pre-state militias fighting the British. Both of these movies also received Oscar nominations. 

But then, Kishon and Mizrahi went abroad – Kishon to Switzerland out of pique over his treatment by Israel’s literary establishment; and Mizrahi to France to fulfill himself artistically. Mizrahi won an Oscar for his French film, Madame Rosa (1977), starring Simone Signoret as a Holocaust survivor and former prostitute. 

Uri Zohar

ANOTHER IMPORTANT director in the early period was Uri Zohar, who came from the world of sketch comedy with the Lool gang, a group of actors and musicians that included Arik Einstein. Zohar directed several films, mostly comedies with an edgy side that co-starred himself and Einstein; and the drama Three Days and a Child, an adaptation of the story by A. B. Yehoshua, for which Oded Kotler won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967.

The best of the Einstein-Zohar collaborations are Big Eyes (1974), a movie that stars Zohar as a self-centered basketball talent scout, which leaves little doubt about his creeping guilt over his own egoism; and, most of all, Peeping Toms (1972), the bromance about beach bums that would have made Einstein into a huge movie star if the industry had been more developed then and if he had been ambitious about an acting career.

But Zohar left the entertainment world and traveled on a path that took him – psychologically speaking – even further than Europe. He embraced ultra-Orthodoxy and became a rabbi in Jerusalem. 

Just as the door of one career closed, though, another career opened as an even younger filmmaker, 24-year-old Avi Nesher, came along. He defied all expectations by making a comedy-drama-musical set in an army entertainment troupe, The Troupe (Ha Lahaka) in 1978, which was a huge popular success. He followed it up quickly with Dizengoff 99, a risqué film at the time about two guys and a girl who share a Tel Aviv apartment and want to make movies. Both films starred young people who became star musicians and actors, among them Gidi Gov and Gali Atari. But Hollywood beckoned, and Nesher spent most of the 1980s and 1990s making genre movies there. Two of Israel’s top producers of popular films, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, also made Los Angeles their home base, not long after their dramatized version of the Entebbe rescue, Operation Thunderbolt, with Yehoram Gaon as Yoni Netanyahu, which was nominated for an Oscar.

To put it kindly, the 1980s and 1990s were lean times for the Israeli movie industry. A handful of mostly mediocre at best films were made each year, and part of the Israel Film Fund’s budget went to paying theater owners for the heating and air-conditioning costs they incurred when they showed these locally made movies in virtually empty theaters. 

The biggest hit of this period was Uri Barbash’s 1984 Beyond the Walls, a movie that used prison-story tropes to tell a tale of Jewish and Palestinian inmates in an Israeli prison who unite against the corrupt warden and establishment. It featured stellar performances by Israeli leading men Arnon Zadok and Mohammad Bakri, as well as Assi Dayan as a left-wing prisoner who feels more at home with the Palestinians. Whether you agreed with its political message or not, it was a good movie that featured a hit song by Boaz Sharabi, and it also received an Oscar nomination. Two other bright spots in this decade were Rafi Bukai’s Avanti Popolo (1986), starring Salim Daw, about two Egyptian soldiers trapped behind Israeli lines at the end of the Six Day War; and Renen Schorr’s Late Summer Blues (1987), about high school students during the War of Attrition. Schorr went on to found the Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television in Jerusalem. 

TWO NOTABLE films from the 1990s were Ayelet Menahemi and Nirit Yaron’s Tel Aviv Stories (1992), an anthology film about three very different women; and Arik Kaplun’s Yana’s Friends (1999), about a Russian woman on her own in Tel Aviv during the First Gulf War. But most movies during these years were so dismal and featured uninteresting people screaming at each other in Tel Aviv apartments that I coined an acronym for such films, “TAMP” movies, short for “Tel Aviv’s miserable people.”

In the 21th century, fortunately, things began to change for the better, first slowly and then very fast, as a few developments came together to accelerate and improve the industry. First, the Knesset passed the Cinema Law in 2001, which was supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle and greatly increased government funding for the movie industry. At the same time, graduates of Israeli film schools were starting to work, adding professionalism; and the cinematheques and their film festivals had created a sophisticated cinephile culture.

Television’s Channel 2 became popular, and the Israeli public was hungry for Hebrew-language content, so a young generation of filmmakers began honing their craft in TV studios before making feature films. Eytan Fox’s breakthrough feature, Yossi & Jagger (2002), was originally a TV movie that was eventually shown all over the world. Fox went on to become one of Israel’s leading filmmakers, and Yossi & Jagger, a groundbreaking love story about two male soldiers, won several international awards.

Although the IDF refused to cooperate when he was filming it, it is now used to train soldiers about sensitivity. Fox’s 2004 film, Walk on Water, about a Mossad agent (Lior Ashkenazi) and the grandson of a notorious Nazi, earned millions of dollars abroad. 

Around the time the Cinema Law was passed, Nesher returned to Israel to live and work and began collaborating with two ambitious producers who wanted to invest in the local film industry, Leon Edery and Moshe Edery, who had just started the first Cinema City multiplex in Glilot. Since returning to Israel, Nesher has made eight extraordinary movies, starting with Turn Left at the End of the World in 2004, a unique story of two teenage girls in a Negev town in the 1960s – one from a Moroccan background, one from India. 

Nearly a million Israelis saw Turn Left in theaters, proving that they would happily watch Israeli films if they were good. Nesher’s movies mix comedy and drama, focusing on diverse subjects and telling stories inspired by Israeli reality. He made movies about female seminary students delving into Kabbalak in The Secrets (2007); a teen who works for a Holocaust survivor matchmaker in 1960s Haifa in The Matchmaker (2010); a hipster artist who tries to help a troubled rabbi in Jerusalem in The Wonders (2013); two sisters, one an aspiring classical music composer and one who publishes a political/porn mag, who try to learn the truth about their mysterious father’s background in Past Life (2016); a father who tries to reconnect with his newly religious daughter in The Other Story (2018); young Jews and Egyptians facing each other in the battle of Nitzanim during the War of Independence in Image of Victory (2021); and The Monkey House (2023), about a neglected novelist who tries to pull off a literary scam. All his films are distinctive and feature Israel’s best actors, many of whom he discovered, such as Joy Rieger, Liraz Charchi, and Neta Garty. 

Every year, Israeli cinema seemed to hit new heights for most of the 2000s and into the next decade. Just as Fox began telling stories of gay Israelis, members of other communities who hadn’t made movies before starting making films. One of the most important Israeli directors who began his career in the 21rst century, Joseph Cedar, grew up in a National Religious household. Until he came along, there had been almost no religious directors. His first film, Time of Favor (2000), was about a young soldier who falls under the spell of a charismatic but fanatical rabbi who wants his followers to bomb the Dome of the Rock mosque. He followed it up with Campfire (2004), which tells the story of a religious widow who wants to move to the West Bank, and her two daughters, who don’t. His 2008 movie, Beaufort, the story of an Israeli outpost on the Lebanese border, became the first Israeli film to be nominated for an Oscar in more than 20 years. His subsequent film, Footnote (2011), also received an Oscar nomination, and was about father and son Talmud scholars.  

SHULI RAND, a newly ultra-Orthodox actor, teamed up with Gidi Dar to make Ushpizin. The 2004 drama Rand co-wrote and in which he starred was about a religious former criminal menaced by old associates during a holiday. Rama Burshtein, a once secular student trained at the Sam Spiegel Film School, became observant and started making movies about ultra-Orthdodox women, such as Fill the Void and The Wedding Plan. 

There had always been Mizrahi filmmakers, and actress Ronit Elkabetz teamed up with her brother, Shlomi Elkabetz, to make a trilogy of especially memorable movies inspired by the story of her Moroccan-born mother and her unhappy marriage: To Take a Wife, Shiva, and Gett. Israel’s most recent Ophir Award winner, Seven Blessings by Ayelet Menahemi, featured a script by two Moroccan actresses who are cousins, Reymonde Amsallem and Eleanor Sela, that looked at a tradition in this community that harmed girls psychologically.

Other immigrant filmmakers added their points of view, notably Georgian-born Dover Koshashvili, whose 2001 film, Late Wedding, starred Lior Ashkenazi and Ronit Elkabetz, the king and queen of Israeli cinema’s second golden age, as a Georgian man supported by his parents and his divorced girlfriend they don’t approve of. 

The traumas of the first Lebanon War, which formed the basis for Cedar’s film Beaufort, inspired two other Israelis who had fought in this war to make films about it. Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s 2008 animated documentary, used imagery and surreal moments to tell a personal story that had a huge impact. In 2009, Samuel Maoz told an intricately constructed tale of this war from inside of a tank in his film Lebanon, and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. 

Israeli Arabs also began to share their experiences. While some Arab filmmakers preferred to move to Europe and disassociate themselves from the Israeli film funds, others told unique stories of Arab life in Israel, which won international awards and recognition. Among these are Maysaloun Hamoud, who made an unforgettable film, In Between (2016), about three young Arab women living in Tel Aviv. Sameh Zoabi told a tale of an Arab village cut off from cellphone reception in Man without a Cell Phone (2010), and looked at a writer on a soap opera made in Ramallah in Tel Aviv on Fire (2018). Arab screenwriter Suha Arraf teamed up with Jewish director Eran Riklis to make The Syrian Bride, about a Druze family, which featured great performances by Makram Khoury and Clara Khoury as father and daughter, and Hiam Abbass, who became an international star on the TV series Succession, as the bride’s sister. 

Some directors looked across the border for inspiration. Eran Kolirin made one of the most beloved Israeli movies of all time, The Band’s Visit (2007), about a police band from Egypt that gets lost in a small Negev town, where the band leader (Sasson Gabay) sparks with a local woman played by Ronit Elkabetz. The movie was adapted into a Broadway show that won 10 Tony Awards. In 2021, Kolirin adapted a novel by Sayed Kashua about an Arab from Jerusalem stranded in family’s village, Let It Be Morning. 

Many women filmmakers have broken through in the last decade. The highest profile of these has been Talya Lavie, whose epic comedy about depressed female IDF soldiers, Zero Motivation (2014), won the Narrative Feature Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 2019, Aalam-Warqe Davidian looked at her family’s history in Ethiopia in her film Fig Tree. And in this very beleaguered year, Tom Nesher’s Come Closer won the Viewpoints Award at Tribeca and will compete this year in the Jerusalem Film Festival. Nesher is Avi Nesher’s daughter.

While at one time, Israeli movies won top prizes at every film festival around the world, in recent years Israeli filmmakers have struggled to get their movies accepted at top festivals. It didn’t happen all at once, but festivals that once took four or five Israeli movies every year cut back to one or two and then to none, or began to take only the most stridently left-leaning ideological films by directors such as Nadav Lapid and Amos Gitai. Since Oct. 7, it goes without saying, the picture has become even more bleak. 

Another issue has been the success of Israeli television, which has drawn many talented creators to the small screen. 

It would be naïve to think that Israeli films will be welcome at most film festivals around the world anytime soon. For now, those who want to see the newest Israeli films at festivals should head for Jerusalem this week.   