The Venice Film Festival began last week, and the Toronto International Film Festival opened yesterday. Although Israeli movies were once embraced by these festivals – the largest and among the most important film festivals in Europe and North America – only two full-length movies and one short film from Israel will be shown at them this year.
Israeli movies are currently experiencing a period of amazing quality and diversity, with voices from virtually every community in the country telling their stories on screen, but it seems likely that only Israelis and audiences who frequent Jewish and Israeli film festivals in the US will see them – at least for the foreseeable future.
The number of Israeli films accepted to major international film festivals had been dwindling in the years before Oct. 7, but the outbreak of the war with Hamas and the subsequent international condemnation of Israel have made Israeli filmmakers, with rare exceptions – the highly political, Left-leaning directors Nadav Lapid and Amos Gitai – personae non gratae around the world.
It’s ironic because Israeli filmmakers tend to make movies that are critical of the government and tell stories from all sectors of Israeli life, including Arabs. During these past two years since the outbreak of the war, Israeli filmmakers have been releasing many terrific films, but audiences outside of Israel won’t see them except at Jewish and Israeli film festivals.
This year’s Venice Film Festival has been roiled by an open letter signed by thousands of film industry professionals calling for the festival to take a strong stance against Israel in the current war. Another letter demanded that invitations to two of the stars in Julian Schnabel’s movie In the Hand of Dante – Israeli actress Gal Gadot and Scottish-born actor Gerard Butler, who has appeared at fundraisers for Israeli organizations – be rescinded, although it was not clear that either performer planned to attend the film festival.
Israeli films are represented at the festival by a single VR short, Eddie and I, by Maya Shekel, in the Venice Immersive section.
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which opened on September 4, accepted the documentary The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, by Barry Avrich, about how retired general Noam Tibon headed south the morning of Oct. 7 to try to rescue his son Amir and his family from Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
But controversy followed when the festival disinvited the film with the specious claim that the filmmakers had not received permission from Hamas to use clips the terrorist group had filmed and broadcast of its murders and abductions. TIFF also said that a factor in the initial decision to disinvite the film was the possibility of protests.
There was an outcry, and for the first time in history, TIFF made the cover of the New York Post. The festival management backtracked, scheduling a single screening of the film – many others are shown multiple times – albeit at a large venue.
The other Israeli film at TIFF is Or Sinai’s drama Mama, which has nothing to do with politics or the war. But that was also true of Shemi Zarhin’s Bliss, which was shown at TIFF last year in a screening that was disrupted by anti-Israel protesters.
Comedians canceled too
Film festivals are not the only cultural events freezing out Israelis and sometimes all Jews. Jewish comedians Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon were booked to perform at the Whistlebinkies venue during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, but both had their shows canceled.
The festival staff said that the decision to cancel these shows was due to the venue owners alone, who cited “security concerns” – i.e., that there could be protests. Instead of supporting the artists and providing security for them, they chose not to hold the shows.
In Edinburgh, writer/director Marcus Freed took to the streets during the festival to blow the shofar in protest against the antisemitic cancellations. However, a street performance/protest that can work at a theater festival is not effective at a film festival.
No Israeli filmmakers wanted to be quoted by name for this article, as they are hoping that once the war ends, film festivals will once again accept their work, and they are afraid to poke the bear, so to speak.
But one filmmaker, who is working on a movie inspired by the attack that started the war, said, “I would have been sure this movie would be shown at festivals abroad, before the war, that it would get released in America and Europe, maybe get shown on Netflix; but now, who knows? You feel you’re doing work just as good as you’ve ever done, but you know it may never get shown outside Israel.”
Echoing what many Israeli filmmakers told me, this director said, “I’m no friend of Bibi, I never voted for him, and it seems crazy that my work won’t get shown because of his policies, but that’s the situation. Can you imagine if American films weren’t shown around the world because people in Europe or wherever don’t like Trump?”
Dani Rosenberg’s Of Dogs and Men is a fact-based drama about a teen girl (played by Or Avinoam) searching for the dog she lost in Kibbutz Nir Oz, where more than a quarter of the residents were killed or kidnapped. It’s a haunting film, tinged with the atmosphere of loss that Rosenberg and his crew found just weeks after the massacre.
It premiered last year at Venice, to mixed reviews, but didn’t ignite the kind of controversy that The Road Between Us has. It was as if the movie came out so quickly, it caught people off guard.
Several filmmakers are currently at work on movies about the Oct. 7 attack, and it remains to be seen what kind of reception they will receive abroad.
When the war broke out, movie theaters in Israel were closed for a while, of course. But soon they reopened, and film festivals started up. Two filmmakers – Tom Nesher and Yousef Abo Madegem, who couldn’t be more different from each other – released stunning debut films in 2024. Given the anti-Israel climate, it’s impressive that both movies were shown at even a few film festivals abroad.
Tom Nesher’s Come Closer is a moving story of love and loss, told in such a way that it has a universal appeal. The main character is Eden (Lia Elalouf), a troubled but privileged young woman in Tel Aviv who loses her younger brother suddenly – as Nesher lost her brother, Ari Nesher, in a tragic accident in 2018 – and finds herself drawn to the girlfriend (Darya Rosen) from a more modest background he kept hidden from the family.
Nesher, 28, the daughter of celebrated director Avi Nesher, made short films for years before releasing Come Closer.
The movie was shown in the Viewpoints section of the Tribeca Festival in New York last year, and it won the top prize in that section. Back at home, it won four Ophir Awards, including Best Picture, which made it Israel’s official selection for Oscar consideration, as well as Best Director, Best Actress (for Elalouf), and Best Editing (for Shauly Melamed).
It was also shown at the Cleveland International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Film Festival, where Nesher won the Directors to Watch Award. She was also named to Variety’s “10 directors to watch in 2025” list. At the end of August, the film was released in Italy, a triumph for any Israeli director in this era. It was also picked up by US distributor Greenwich Entertainment, one of the top indie distributors in the world, and the company just scheduled it for a December release, although no exact date has been given yet.
Ed Arentz, co-president of Greenwich Entertainment, said in a statement when the company acquired the film, “We’re so pleased to release Tom Nesher’s preternaturally assured debut that mines her own personal trauma to forge a deeply affecting and relatable tale of flaming youth confronting sudden loss and unexpected connection.”
Eid, by Abo Madegem, is also a debut feature, and it won the Jerusalem Film Festival’s top award for Israeli features in 2024.
It tells a highly original, complex story of a Bedouin construction worker in Rahat who, coping with the trauma of a sexual abuse by a family friend, dreams of writing like Jean Genet and going to Paris. Meanwhile, he struggles to earn a living and finds himself in conflict with his parents, who want him to marry an uneducated woman he fears will never understand him. Shadi Mar’i, best known for his role in the TV series Fauda, gives a wonderful performance in the lead, and won the Ophir Award for Best Actor.
To say that this gracefully told film shatters stereotypes about the Bedouin is an understatement, which makes sense because Madegem, a 55-year-old father of 10, is from this community. He worked on this film for 15 years while running a furniture store in Rahat.
The movie was shown at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, as well as Jerusalem. But given its high quality, its themes of a working-class young man with artistic aspirations suffering from trauma due to sexual abuse, and the fact that it is the first full-length movie directed by a Bedouin, you would think it would have been an international sensation.
Like Come Closer, Eid deserves more recognition than it has received so far. If Nesher were French or Madegem were from any Arab country, I’m convinced these movies would have been released theatrically in multiple countries already and perhaps even have been nominated for or won an Oscar.
The two movies also exemplify two trends over the period since the war began: movies by women directors and by Arab directors/screenwriters.
Israel's best female directors
Female directors especially have thrived recently, dominating local film festivals and the Ophir Awards with movies that look at varied aspects of women’s experience from diverse viewpoints and in different styles. Most of these movies are their director’s first or second film.
Maya Kenig’s The Milky Way (2024) is a wildly inventive, bitterly funny comedy that finds laughs in an only slightly dystopian vision of contemporary Tel Aviv.
Starring Hila Ruach and Hadas Yaron, it tells of a world where wealthy parents can subscribe to a kind of breast-milk bank, to which poorer women sell their milk to support their families – a 21st-century version of 19th-century wet nurses. While having a baby is usually a joyful time, it can also be unspeakably stressful, especially for those who face financial problems, as well as emotional issues around parenthood.
Because of the universality of its story, this is a movie I can see being remade in countries around the world. Kenig won the 2024 Ophir Award for the screenplay.
Maya Dreifuss’s Highway 65, also from 2024, is an extremely entertaining neo-noir murder mystery. Tali Sharon, whom many will remember fondly as Hodaya on the TV series Srugim, plays a police detective posted to Afula after she got into a conflict with her bosses in Tel Aviv.
If you can imagine Liz Lemon, the heroine of Tina Fey’s TV comedy series 30 Rock as an Israeli detective, then you’ve got an idea of what this detective is like. On her new beat, she is given the minor tasks no one wants, such as getting a cellphone back to its rightful owner.
However, as she investigates, she learns that the young woman, Orly (Anastacia Fein), who owns the cellphone, has gone missing, and that the young woman was involved with a vile, corrupt real estate family, which reminded me of the film Against All Odds. One of the sons of the rich family is played by actor/musician/war hero Idan Amedi, who lights up the screen with his star presence.
‘Cuz You’re Ugly, by Sharon Angelhart, which debuted at the 2025 Jerusalem Film Festival, tells the story of an overweight, dateless female soldier (Riki Reif Sinai) who comes home from the army to visit her troubled family before going to an officer’s course.
It is an achievement that a young woman from such a family – her father (Yossi Marshek) is affable but absent, and her mother (Yael Abecassis) is depressed and bedridden – could make it to this stage in the army. But when her younger sister (Or Avinoam) gets pregnant at 15, the soldier feels compelled to help her sibling, which gets complicated.
Despite its dark premise, ‘Cuz You’re Ugly is filled with more humor than you would imagine; and thanks to the two lead performances, it’s compelling from start to finish.
Lee Gilat’s Girls Like Us is also about a troubled teenage girl, who falls in love with the female soldier working in a program she attends. It won two Ophir Awards in 2024 – Best Supporting Actor for Yaakov Zada Daniel, and Best Supporting Actress for Bat-el Moseri.
IT’S ODD when two movies with similar plots and themes are made in a single year, but that was the case with Or Sinai’s Mama and Eti Tsicko’s Nandauri. Both films focus on women from Eastern Europe living in Israel who return home, only to be reminded of why they left in the first place. Both films were shown in Jerusalem this summer, and both feature strong lead performances.
In Mama, the Polish heroine is portrayed by Evgenia Dodina, who plays a housekeeper for a wealthy Tel Aviv family. When she breaks her wrist cleaning, they send her home to Poland for a rare vacation.
In Poland, she finds that things have changed. Her husband has taken a younger lover (as she has, in Israel), and her daughter has dropped out of university and gotten engaged. Used to being in control, she struggles to transform her family’s life as she would want it to be. It’s a heartbreaking story, anchored by one of Dodina’s best performances in a career filled with brilliant work.
Nandauri is set in rural Georgia. It’s about Marina (Neta Riskin of the TV drama Shtisel), an Israeli lawyer, who shows up in a small town in the mountains. She grew up in a brutal family near the town and left years before, so her mission on behalf of a client who grew up in this town is personal to her.
A complicated road trip she takes spotlights Marina’s conflicted relationship with a local man who is connected to the case, to whom she voices her anger over her abusive parents and the Georgian traditions that subjugate women.
Dead Language, by Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival and was also shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2025. It’s an expanded version of their charming Oscar-nominated short film, Aya, about a woman (Sarah Adler) who impulsively picks up a stranger (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen) at the airport, pretending to be his chauffeur. Dead Language still starts with that setup and those two wonderful actors, but it becomes a wide-ranging, sometimes surreal look at Aya’s rocky road to understanding herself and what she wants from her marriage.
Houses, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and was shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2025, was directed by Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum. It is an austere, carefully made, beautifully photographed black-and-white portrait of a nonbinary man who immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1990, and returns as a young adult to all the houses he lived in during his childhood in Safed, reliving traumas and examining his memories. If this were any other year, a film with this subject matter would be playing at every international film festival in the world.
Oxygen, by Netalie Braun, tells the story of Anat (Dana Ivgy), a single mother who plans a trip to India with her soldier son (Ben Sultan) once he is discharged from the army. The plans are disrupted when a war breaks out on the northern border, and she goes to extreme lengths to stop him from fighting, terrified of losing him.
Two movies that were shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival this summer look at the often uneasy reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in different ways.
The Sea, by Shai Carmeli Pollak, which was written in consultation with Arabs living in the West Bank, puts you in the shoes of a Palestinian father (Khalifa Natour) and his 12-year-old son (Mohamad Ghazawi) from a village near Ramallah. The father struggles to support his family as an undocumented construction worker in Israel. When his son sets off on his own to visit the sea in Tel Aviv, the father roams the city looking for him.
The movie leads the Ophir nominations this year, and gently gets across its subtext that there must be a better way to live together.
Bella, by a Jewish/Palestinian directing duo, Zohar Shachar and Jamal Khalaily, is a broad comedy with an over-the-top comic premise: a Jewish man who bred rare doves has just died, without leaving a will. So no one knows who will inherit his most valuable possession – a rare dove named Bella that is worth tens of thousands of dollars. His estranged son (Elisha Banai), who returns from Belgium where he is trying to make it as a musician, and his adopted Palestinian son (Hanna Birakh), who stayed with the father till the end, have to decide what will become of the bird. The dove ends up at a wedding on the West Bank. Although it’s all obviously a metaphor for the national conflict, it’s explored with humor.
While for now most of these movies will not make it out of Israel, we can only hope that someday audiences around the world will get to appreciate and enjoy them, as they have embraced so many other movies from Israel’s rich film industry. ■