Funeral set for Israel’s only Oscar- winning director
Jerusalem: Israeli filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi, the country’s only director of an Oscar- winning film, is to be buried in Tel Aviv on Monday following his death last week, friends and colleagues said.
The 86- year- old director of the Academy Awardwinning 1977 film Madame Rosa, which was filmed in France and starred Simone Signoret, died on Friday.
He also directed two other Oscar- nominated films in the 1970s: I Love You Rosa and The House on Chelouche Street.
Madame Rosa, the story of a former prostitute in Paris who had survived the Auschwitz death camp, won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, representing France.
It was an adaptation of the novel The Life Before Us by French author Romain Gary, written under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. Born in 1931 in Egypt, Mizrahi emigrated to what was then British Mandatory Palestine in 1946 with his mother and brother. His brother was killed in an Egyptian air strike in the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation.
He studied film in France in the 1950s and spent much of his career there before returning to Israel. His other films included Every Time We Say Goodbye, set in Jerusalem and released in 1986 starring Tom Hanks.
Regine Mihal Friedman, a retired professor of film studies at Tel Aviv University where Mizrahi also taught, called him “an extremely special figure in Israeli cinema”.