Israeli Film Festival in Paris attracts record audiences
During the week, most of the more than 35 screenings played to full houses or close to it, the highest attendance record to date for this festival.
By BRETT KLINE/GLOBESUpdated: MARCH 29, 2018 16:19FOXTROT Trailer | TIFF 2017. (YouTube/TIFF Trailers)
PARIS (Tribune News Service) — The Israeli Film festival in Paris opened this year with the controversial anti-war award winner in Venice, Foxtrot, directed by Samuel Maoz. During the week that followed, most of the more than 35 screenings played to full houses or close to it, the highest attendance record to date for this festival.For the record, it included feature films from 2017 such as The Cakemaker by Raul Graizer, Norman by Joseph Cedar, Maktub (Oded Raz), five features directed by Eran Riklis, Israeli classics Siege by Italian Gilberto Tofano (a new wave beauty from 1969), and Rage and Glory by Avi Nesher on the Stern gang 1947-48.Also presented for the first time was a French documentary called Israel: a Land Twice Promised, scheduled for broadcast on the French-German Arte channel, a co-producer. It featured one-on-one interviews of Israeli and Palestinian historians, unfortunately sitting in a studio instead of in the field, let’s say, walking and talking on the Green Line or in Jerusalem, in sync with some of the dramatic historical footage presented.And yes, the first two episodes of the second season of Fauda were screened, and I regretfully missed them. After running last year in the United States, the first season of Fauda just began about three weeks ago on Netflix in France, so the French are only now discovering how real, dramatic and violent it is, pitting the Shin Bet Mista’aravim unit against a renegade Hamas leader in the West Bank.I chatted at length with French (and half Lebanese by origin) actress Laetitia Eido, who looks at home in the role of the Palestinian doctor Shirin in the series. The doctor role has sparked in her a real interest in the Israel-Palestinian situation, more than she ever could have experienced at home in the south of France. And while the Israeli and American press has been all over the series and her performance, the French press has not yet discovered her, so to speak.The question is: why a record-breaking number of paying visitors this year? The answer involves some interesting and other not-so-interesting, more trivial factors.As has already been well-documented in the press, Foxtrot angered right-wing Israeli culture minister Miri Regev, who accused the film of strengthening the BDS movement and slandering the IDF. Upon learning that Foxtrot was opening the Paris event, she pressured the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to shut down its financial support for the festival. When that did not happen, Regev ordered Israel's ambassador to France, Aliza Ben-Nun, not to attend the opening night. “Because of the situation with Regev, festival sponsors from the French Jewish community were able to screen Foxtrot beforehand,” said Hélène Schoumann, president of the festival. “I was happy that all of them except two stayed with us.” She would not say which two pulled out. “But I heard I was some kind of hero in Israel for people who don’t like the minister,” she added with a smile.“People did not come just to give the finger to the minister,” commented Danielle Coscas, a festival attendee who saw six films altogether, “but the polemic did not hurt attendance, for sure. And as I live nearby, it was very easy for me to come.”She noted that Israeli cinema is “very absorbing, not commercial or easy-to-watch; and so most young people in Paris stay away.”She was right about two things. For the second time, the festival was held in the Majestic Cinema, in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, or district, of Paris, with its large and comfortable Jewish population.