When over 5,000 American and international actors and filmmakers signed a pledge in September by Film Workers for Palestine to boycott Israeli “film institutions” – which in practice means virtually all Israeli films – it made headlines around the world.
But in Israel, the boycott call merely confirmed what filmmakers here already knew – that since the war in Gaza began two years ago, there has been an informal boycott abroad of Israeli movies.
With a handful of exceptions, most Israeli works have been rejected by major and minor international film festivals and are not distributed in markets abroad.
Boycotting institutions
This de facto boycott is also affecting television. Season 3 of the Israeli thriller series Tehran, which won an International Emmy, was broadcast on Kan 11 in Israel in December. But Apple TV+, which streamed the first two seasons around the world, has not yet announced a release date for the third season, even though it features high-profile British actor Hugh Laurie in a key role.
Those who called for the boycott – a group that includes such stars as Emma Stone, Javier Bardem, and Cynthia Nixon – have been quoted as saying that it is against institutions and not individuals, but that is either ignorant or disingenuous. Virtually all Israeli movies receive money from several government-supported film funds. This is similar to how most film industries outside of the United States work. Except for a few productions, Israeli films rarely make much of a profit.
The film funds never completely finance a film; but once a production has received the stamp of approval in the form of a grant from an Israeli fund, Israeli producers make up the difference with money from co-production funds, usually in Western Europe. Or rather, they did before October 7, 2023.
Moshe Edery’s United King Films is one of the only private Israeli companies that support Israeli films, but it can’t fund everything.
Another aspect of the boycott call is that any movie taking part in an Israeli film festival or Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars – the Ophir Awards – is off limits; and almost all Israeli films are shown at local festivals and are submitted to the Ophirs for consideration.
Silencing Israeli voices
The call to boycott set off instant alarm bells in many quarters. More than 1,000 industry professionals, which included Liev Schreiber and Debra Messing, signed a strongly worded letter sponsored by the Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), criticizing the boycott call as “a de facto attempt to silence Jewish stories and ostracize Israeli filmmakers.”
More recently, Warner Bros. and Paramount studios released statements saying that the boycott was discriminatory and that they would not comply with it.
Lawrence Bender, a Hollywood producer who signed the CCFP letter and whose credits include Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting, was especially outspoken in his criticism of the boycott.
Bender recently began focusing on making movies and television shows in Israel, producing the TV series Red Alert, a drama about the October 7 massacre by Hamas, which was shown in Israel on Keshet 12 and is currently streaming around the world on Paramount+.
“I think this boycott is really serious and dangerous,” Bender told The Jerusalem Report.
“For nearly two months, I was in Israel for the filming of Red Alert and for the Jerusalem Film Festival, where I met with as many filmmakers as I could. It’s extraordinary how many incredibly talented writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew exist, driven by a passion for film-making and storytelling…” he said.
“Almost everyone there agreed that it’s now become almost impossible to get their movies or shows done abroad because of the rampant anti-Israel hate, which is infuriating…How could anyone simply negate an entire group of artists because they [the boycotters] don’t like the government?”
Ironic boycott
The issue is understandably emotional for Israeli filmmakers and television professionals who, as a group, tend to be left-wing and critical of the government – and who now find themselves canceled on the world stage because of an association with a government that they oppose.
The signatories of the Film Workers for Palestine letter don’t seem to know or care that they are shutting down Israeli voices that are critical of the government’s actions, nor do they seem concerned that there are Arabs among the Israeli filmmakers they are canceling and that their actions may result in Palestinian stories being silenced.
A case in point is The Sea, the winner of this year’s Ophir Award for Best Picture, which is Israel’s candidate for consideration for a Best International Feature Oscar.
The film tells the story of a Palestinian boy from the West Bank who is prevented from joining a class trip to visit the beach by Israeli officials and who sneaks off on his own to head for the seashore.
The movie was written and directed by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, an Israeli, and produced by Baher Agbariya, a Palestinian. It was funded by two Israeli film funds, participated in the Ophir Awards, winning Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Original Score, and was shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival, putting it in the boycott category.
Agbariya spoke out in a recent interview on the online news site Deadline Hollywood, criticizing the Israel-Hamas War and calling Israel’s actions “genocide,” but pleading for the movie not to be boycotted.
“I think [the boycott] is wrong. These points need to be discussed to see when it’s right and when it’s wrong. I believe this story [The Sea] should cross the ocean and be seen everywhere,” he told the outlet.
While many in Israel and abroad wish the film well, Oscar watchers said they doubted the film had a chance to make the shortlist, which will be announced in December.
Israeli filmmakers are spiraling from quietly panicked to deeply depressed, and most did not want to speak on the record about the issue.
A half dozen established filmmakers spoke off the record, listing all the film festivals that once welcomed their work in the past and have turned them down since October 7, 2023, such as Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto.
One filmmaker told the Report that while it was difficult to see their careers go up in smoke, they understood the impulse to cancel Israeli culture because of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. “We’re an extremist minority,” he said.
Another layer of irony is the extremely hostile relationship between most of the filmmaking community and the government. Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar was so incensed by The Sea’s Ophir triumph that he pledged to withhold funds from the Ophir Awards in the future.
Homage to a hostage
Tom Shoval, an Israeli filmmaker who has had a successful career in Israel and abroad, was one of the few who agreed to go on record. Shoval’s first film in 2013, Youth, attracted international attention; and Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu executive-produced his next feature, Shake Your Cares Away, starring French-Argentine actress Berenice Bejo.
Shoval’s most recent film is a documentary, Letter to David. The David of the title is David Cunio, one of the 20 Israeli hostages released on October 13 after more than two years in Hamas captivity.
David Cunio, along with his twin brother, Eitan, starred in Youth, where they won acclaim around the world for playing brothers who kidnap a classmate to use the ransom money to pay their family’s debts.
Shoval became close to David and his family during the making of Youth and made Letter to David about the actor and their collaboration. The film explores the many ironies of the fact that David played a kidnapper and was himself kidnapped, and it looks at his life in Kibbutz Nir Oz more than a decade ago.
While the film premiered at Berlin in 2025, Shoval has had a harder time than he expected getting it shown in other places.
Part of the problem, he explained, was that venues are afraid of demonstrations, vandalism, and public criticism for spotlighting an Israeli movie. “They just don’t want the headache,” he said.
One festival in England accepted the film, scheduled it, and then declined to show it.
“There were other festivals,” he said. “There was one in New York, where the festival manager told me he really liked it, he found it moving [and], that they considered it until the last minute. He never said, ‘We didn’t take it because it was Israeli,’ but that was the subtext… Because if he liked it so much, why didn’t they take it?” Shoval said.
“He could have just said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks; better luck next time,’ but he told me how much they all liked it. He was worried about public opinion, about the reaction.”
Shoval also noted that some have criticized the film for not giving the Palestinian point of view, to which he responds, “I always say it’s a personal film about a family and about my connection with David and Eitan Cunio. I never said it’s a comprehensive look at the war from every point of view.”
Israeli filmmakers today are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, he noted. If they make a movie about the war, it will have to stand up to certain ideological tests, which his film about the Cunio family did not.
But apolitical films from Israel also face problems.
“Now, every Israeli movie that isn’t about October 7 or the here and now, people will say, with some justification, ‘How is it relevant?’ A movie can be excellent, and a few years ago it would have gotten into every festival you can imagine; and now there’s the feeling that there’s no point to it and it doesn’t get in,” he said.
Challenging the narrative
French-Israeli producer Thomas Alfandari has had a unique experience this year that provides an interesting window into the predicament of Israeli filmmakers.
He is among the producers of two new films. One is Bella, an irreverent and very funny comedy about Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, directed by Zohar Shahar, an Israeli, and Jamal Khailaily, a Palestinian (co-produced by two of the world’s most distinguished directors, Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne). The other film is Yes!, Nadav Lapid’s latest movie, a scathing attack on Israeli society that mocks those who grieve the victims of October 7.
Both films received money from Israeli film funds, were shown in Israeli film festivals, and took part in the Ophir Awards, in which Yes! won two awards.
But, according to Alfandari, Bella – which is a model of Israeli-Palestinian collaboration and conflicts with the worldview of many critics of Israel – has been turned down by every major international film festival it has been submitted to; while Yes!, which premiered at Cannes, has been shown at festivals all over the world, such as Rome, Woodstock, and Rio, and opened commercially in France.
Despite the film’s critique of Israel, Alfandari said his daughter’s film-school classmates in Paris debated whether to boycott Yes!, and some did.
Alfandari recounted, “I recently submitted a project to a French film fund, and I was told by a senior person there that there are no directives against taking films with Israeli funding.”
However, he said that those who evaluate submissions might feel differently: “There’s no way to know.”
Driven by antisemitism
Bender is more blunt about what he sees as the root cause of the boycott.
He noted, “While [the Film Workers for Palestine signatories] are clearly against what the brutal regime of Iran does to its people who don’t comply with their rules, like the young girl Mahsa Amini, who was beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly, the Hollywood community doesn’t boycott the filmmakers there.
“In other words, just because you don’t agree with a government, you don’t boycott the creative people who live there. There’s only one reason the boycott happens to the Israeli community: antisemitism,” Bender said, adding, “Antisemitism disguises itself today as anti-Zionism. And I fear it will only get worse before it can get better.”
He said he took solace in Paramount+’s “commitment to artistic freedom with their global support of Red Alert,” which he said has gotten a warm response from viewers in the United States since it premiered on October 7, 2025.
Shoval, who is updating Letter to David to reflect Cunio’s release from Hamas captivity, concluded: “Things can change. If there is a real change in the Middle East, maybe they will change… But it could take a long time.”■