More than just Beaufort's Oscar nomination makes 5768 memorable.
By HANNAH BROWNWaltz with Bashir good 88 248(photo credit: Courtesy)
The year in Israeli movies had its ups and downs, but the ups took us very high, while the downs will never bring us back to the pre-2001 era, in which the country produced only one or two quality films a decade (if that many). It will be remembered as the year that Israel garnered its first Foreign-Language Film Oscar nomination in 24 years, for Joseph Cedar's Beaufort, as well as the year that this very serious film was the focus of a silly controversy.
The year was also notable for the release of an extremely original documentary, Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, which generated an enormous amount of buzz at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened in the main competition. But other than Waltz with Bashir, there were few new high-quality films. The local film industry seems to be settling into a cycle of spectacular years - last year was one, in which Beaufort and Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit garnered attention and prizes around the world, along with several other locally made gems - and simply good ones, like this year.
That's partly a function of the fact that the most celebrated local directors, such as Cedar and Kolirin, simply can't make a movie a year, as some filmmakers (although few serious ones) manage to do abroad. After their movie is released, directors here generally spend a year taking it to festivals, gathering prizes and acclaim along the way, and only then return to start their next project, which usually takes at least a couple of years to complete.
Around this time last year, the big Oscar fight kicked off, when the Ophir Award, the prize of the Israeli Academy for Film and Television, went to The Band's Visit, an audience-pleasing but still thought-provoking film about the culture clash between an Egyptian orchestra lost in the Negev and the local residents. Beaufort, a hard-hitting adaptation of Ron Leshem's novel about the last IDF soldiers stationed in Lebanon, won four Ophir awards, but only the winner of the Best Picture Ophir becomes Israel's official selection to be considered for one of the five nominee slots for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
The rules in this Oscar category are rigid on one particular point: The bulk of the dialogue in the nominated films must be in a language other than English (a rule that drew criticism this year, but which is intended to give a boost to filmmakers who work outside the English-speaking film industries). The Band's Visit, in which much of the dialogue between the characters is in their one shared language, English, was disqualified, and Beaufort, the runner-up, became the country's representative and received an Oscar nomination. The sniping in the press between admirers of the two films reached a fevered pitch, although, to their credit, both directors remained above the fray.
This flap highlighted several issues, one positive, the other negative. On the plus side, it drew attention to the embarrassment of artistic riches in the local film industry: Who would have dreamed 10 years ago that two very different movies in a single year would realistically have a shot at winning an Oscar?
But the downside is the focus on a single prize. True, there would have been a national celebration if Beaufort had won an Oscar, but to focus so much on that award is simply an insult to Cedar and Kolirin. After all, both works are wonderful movies that we can all enjoy here and take pride in when they captivate audiences abroad. Both films played all over the world this past year, including the hard-to-crack US market, and, in the period since their release, won awards at dozens of major festivals, including the European Film Awards (where The Band's Visit won two prizes in December, including a Best Actor for Sasson Gabai).
THIS YEAR, one movie dominated the scene in terms of sheer quality, ambition and originality, and that was Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. Like the Iranian-born writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who turned her autobiographical memoir, Persepolis, into an acclaimed animated film, Folman used an animated format for his documentary.
Waltz with Bashir tells the story of Folman's and his friends' memories of their time in the First Lebanon War in 1982 and the events leading up to the massacre in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps of Palestinians by Phalangist militia. These memories had been haunting Folman since he served there in his early 20s, and the need to examine the experience gradually became more intense.
Folman is perhaps best known for writing the acclaimed television series In Therapy, and directing the haunting, offbeat 1996 film Saint Clara. Although he doesn't draw and had to work with an animator, he told The International Herald Tribune that "animation was the only way to tell this story; I was sure of that."
A typical talking-heads documentary would not capture the intensity of his and his friends' memories, and he had no intention of making a conventional anti-war or political film. "It doesn't deal with the other side, or what we do or don't do to them. The basic statement is: War is useless. But there's nothing you haven't seen before or that we didn't know."
The film starts off with a scary sequence that could give children (and perhaps some adults) nightmares, as a pack of wild dogs roams the Tel Aviv streets, which leads into the memories of his friend, Boaz, who was responsible for killing dogs in Lebanese villages, so they wouldn't bark and alert residents to the Israelis' presence. Twenty years later, he and his friends still cope with the absurdity of the situation into which they were thrown, and grapple with their feelings over the murders committed so close to them in the refugee camps.
In an age of 24-hour news channels and instant sound bites, there is something almost revolutionary about examining an event that took place 25 years ago, and Folman manages it with an intensity that is hard to describe.
There were other local films this year, some good, some bad, but none as memorable. Lost Islands, an inoffensive coming-of-age comedy-drama starring television stars such as Oshri Cohen, was a hit. Only four Israeli features premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival, although in previous years, there were often as many as 14. The film that dominated this small group, Seven Days, by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, was an emotionally charged story about a sudden death in a dysfunctional Moroccan family, that was well made but not groundbreaking. However, the Haifa International Film Festival, which takes place during Succot, announced that it will screen nine new local features, so things could be looking up soon.
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