In a famous and funny moment in Israeli sports history, Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball star Tal Brody gushed “We are on the map!” after his team defeated the heavily favored Soviet Red Army team, CSKA Moscow, in 1977. For about two decades, Israeli filmmakers could have echoed that mantra, as their films won top prizes in dozens of film festivals every year.
But now, “We’re off the map!” could be the new slogan of the Israeli film and television industry.That’s been true for a few years, not only since October 7, but it has intensified since the war broke out. Today, Israeli film and television professionals fear that they face an unofficial but all-too-real cultural boycott.
“It’s bad, it’s really bad,” said one industry professional who, like everyone I spoke to for this article, did not want his or her name or any identifying details used. “Israeli art in the world is boycotted everywhere.”
Cancelling Israeli film screenings
An especially worrying trend is filmmakers being accepted, then disinvited from festivals. This happened to Amit Ulman, whose film, The City – which was praised as dazzlingly original by Israeli critics – was set to be screened in April at the Beijing International Film Festival, but Ulman and his producers’ tickets were canceled at the last minute and the screenings of the film were canceled. In the fall, the Stockholm International Film Festival disinvited, then re-invited Aleeza Chanowitz, whose television series Chanshi was screened there.
And how could Israeli filmmakers feel comfortable at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, where a banner with the words “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was unfurled at the opening ceremony in November? The sign was greeted with applause, including from festival director Orwa Nyrabia, who later apologized.
Since October 7, filmmakers have been contacting me to share their rejections from foreign film funds and their fear for the future. The fear is especially intense because almost all film and television creators rely on coproduction money from abroad to get their projects made.
One sent me a rejection a filmmaker had received from a Europe-based film fund that said, “We just aren’t looking to collaborate with Israeli filmmakers right now.” The fund could have easily turned down the project by saying that it simply didn’t like the film or that it wasn’t right for it. Instead, it was explicit about not wanting to work with Israelis. I have since heard of other filmmakers getting similarly phrased rejections.
ISRAELI CREATORS say the situation is particularly dire because for quite a few years the Israeli film and TV industry enjoyed the prestige of movies and series that succeeded abroad, without having to foot the bill for them.
“These film funds in Europe drive the industry here. Nothing gets made in Israel without money from France or Germany, sometimes Poland or other countries, or Netflix,” said another. “Look at the credits of even the highest profile projects by really big names. They have investors from abroad because they can’t get enough money here. And now that money is gone.”
It’s the same with the television industry, which is also heavily reliant on foreign funding. While Fauda has been hugely successful abroad, and other Israeli television series, such as The Baker and the Beauty, about a baker who falls for a model, were remade in multiple countries, such as the US and India, now this trend seems to be on hold. Several excellent recent Israeli series that have been shown here to popular and critical acclaim either have been turned down by streaming services around the world or have been bought but have not been aired, and may not be anytime soon.
Creators who were developing television projects that had to do with Israeli intelligence agencies were gently told after October 7 that they should think about changing Israelis and Palestinians to British and Irish characters in the ’70s, or factions in some other conflict. “They don’t say, ‘Could you make it less Israeli?’ But that’s what they mean.”
One group that has been especially hard hit by this unofficial boycott are Israeli Arab filmmakers, who for years have had a hard time getting their stories told.
“We’re too Arab for the Israeli film funds and too Israeli for any funding from Arab countries or Europe,” one filmmaker told me. “You can win prizes with a short film, but when you want to make a longer movie, no one is there to contribute.”
While the movies by Israel’s two most acclaimed and most overtly political filmmakers, Nadav Lapid and Amos Gitai, are so critical of Israel that they are still palatable to film festival directors around the world – who can then point to the fact that they are showing Israeli movies – the rest have been out of luck lately when it comes to getting their films screened abroad.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, virtually any completed Israeli feature film that had not been shown theatrically would be accepted to the Toronto International Film Festival, the largest film festival in North America, or the Venice International Film Festival, both of which are held at the end of the summer. Fewer Israeli films tended to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, in the spring, but those that were accepted tended to do well.
But for the past few years, there have been almost no Israeli films shown at these festivals, with the aforementioned exceptions and a few short films and documentaries. The same can be said about the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in the US, where there was a pro-Palestinian protest this year.
At the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, Israeli films flourished under the stewardship of Dieter Kosslick, an avowed friend of the Israeli film industry, for two decades. But since he stepped down following the 2019 Berlinale, where Lapid’s Synonyms took the Golden Lion, the top prize, Israeli movies have rarely been shown there.
In 2023, the sole Israeli film was Asaf Saban’s Delegation, a movie about a teen group visiting Auschwitz in which European film funds had invested, and in 2024, the only Israeli movie was Gitai’s Shikun, a plotless reimagining of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros set in a housing project in a city in southern Israel. More than 50 Berlinale workers signed an open letter before the festival calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the festival leadership take a “stronger institutional stance” on the war, which may have meant disinviting Gitai, but the festival director Carlo Chatrian and Berlinale codirector Mariette Rissenbeek supported his participation.
PART OF the problem started with the pandemic, when some excellent films fell through the cracks.Nir Bergman’s Here We Are was accepted into the Cannes Film Festival in 2020, but the festival was canceled. The movie was released during the pandemic but didn’t find the audience it would have in normal times.
Israeli films don't make the cut
But why didn’t the Israeli film industry regain its previous strength after COVID?“That’s the million-dollar question,” said one professional.
Some in the film community acknowledge that there have been quite a few subpar movies over the last few years, which may be part of the problem.
“There have been a lot of sloppily made movies that have gotten funding from the [Israeli] funds,” said one industry professional – “movies with a decent premise, that might have been good if the script had gone through a few more drafts. But the finished films were not good.”
This professional blamed the mediocre films on cronyism, saying that in a small industry where everyone knows each other, “The gatekeepers fund movies by friends of theirs or children of their friends.”
Still, in his opinion, this did not explain everything. “There were always bad films made here. But they used to get into film festivals,” he said. “Sometimes they even won prizes. Now, nobody is getting in.”One way to gauge Israel’s place in the international film world is to look at Oscar nominations.
In the 1960s and 1970s, five Israeli films were nominated for what was then called the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar: Sallah Shabati (1964), The Policeman (1971), I Love You Rosa (1972), The House on Chelouche Street (1973), and Operation Thunderbolt (1977). One Israeli film, Beyond the Walls, got a nod in the 1980s, and none did in the 1990s. There were no more nominations for Israeli films until 2007, when Beaufort was nominated, and then there were nods in 2008 for Waltz with Bashir, in 2009 for Ajami, and in 2011 for Footnote. Since then, there have been no Israeli films nominated, and Israel is the country with the most nominations without a win.
This trend of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passing up on Israeli films started over a decade ago, but one insider cautioned against looking for an easy answer, and he put much of the blame on the Israel Academy for Film and Television, and not woke politics.
“The Israel Academy consistently picked the movie least likely to appeal to Oscar voters.”Asked why that would be, he said, “Sometimes it’s because they chose a movie that was so quintessentially Israeli [that] it just wouldn’t travel well. Other times, it was because the best movie was by someone who isn’t in their club, someone they dislike for some reason.
“You can’t argue with the result: Israeli movies hardly ever even make the Oscar short list, let alone get nominated. When you go more than a decade with no nomination, and there are plenty of good movies, something is going on.”
The most optimistic thing anyone had to say was that once Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu steps down – as many Israelis hope he will when there are commissions of inquiry about the October 7 military failures – the film funds and festivals abroad might be receptive to Israeli filmmakers again. “I cringe every time one of Bibi’s buddies like [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich or [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir makes some horrible remark about killing people in Gaza. But the hope is that once Bibi and these thugs are gone, we won’t be tainted anymore.”
It remains to be seen whether Israeli filmmakers can recover what they have lost. “It’s just too early to say,” said one producer.