Blue & white screen
Hannah Brown recalls 70 years of Israeli film and TV highlights
When Israel was founded 70 years ago, no one could have anticipated that it would become a world leader in the television and film industries.
Even a decade ago that would have seemed like a stretch. But now Israeli movies and television shows attract worldwide audiences and take home international awards disproportionate to the size of the Israeli industry, and foreign networks and producers are lining up to buy and/or remake Israeli television shows and films.
For the first two decades of the state, movies were few and far between. Israel was the backdrop for such Hollywood films as Exodus (1960), starring Paul Newman and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), with Kirk Douglas. But the local film industry at that time was dominated by humorist turned screenwriter/director Ephraim Kishon, who made several classics, notably Sallah (aka Sallah Shabbati) and The Policeman (aka Hashoter Azulai), which were Israel’s first two nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, in 1964 and 1971, respectively. Sallah in particular has aged incredibly well, and any new immigrants or foreigners interested in the making of the Israel of today are advised to see this film, which stars a very young Chaim Topol playing a much older Mizrahi immigrant who finds his new home infuriating, frustrating and, at rare moments, enchanting.
Another director whose work made an impact in the early days of the Israeli film industry, when just three or four movies were made each year, was the Egyptian-born Moshe Mizrahi, who focused on the Mizrahi community in Israel and how its traditions were in conflict with modern Israeli culture. Two of his films, I Love You Rosa (1972) and The House on Chelouche Street (1973), were also nominated for Oscars.
Uri Zohar was a sketch comedian who turned into a brilliant director in the Sixties and Seventies. Zohar’s very artistic 1967 film Three Days and a Child, an adaptation of the A. B. Yehoshua novella, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and won the Best Actor Award for its star, Oded Kotler. Zohar often collaborated with his friend singer/actor Arik Einstein, on such movies as Peeping Toms (Metzizim) in 1972, where they played versions of themselves hanging out at the beach and picking up girls. The counterculture was just making itself felt in Israel around this time, and this celebration of guys who weren’t clearing the swamps or making the desert bloom was quietly revolutionary.
Toward the end of Seventies, Avi Nesher, then in his early twenties, burst onto the scene with The Troupe (1978), a musical about an army entertainment troupe that rebels against its commander, which was a huge hit and is still shown widely. He followed it up with Dizengoff 99 (1979), which also featured Israelis who weren’t noble and self-sacrificing, but just kids looking to have fun and find their place in the world.
In addition to these four directors, there was a popular genre of broad ethnic slapstick comedies and melodramas known as seretei bourekas, which included movies such as Charlie and a Half by Boaz Davidson, starring Ze’ev Revach and Yehuda Barkan, the Kuni Lemel series and the dramas of George Ovadiah.
But by the early Eighties, the Israeli film industry had fallen on tough times. Kishon had headed for Switzerland, while Mizrahi began working in France. Hollywood lured Nesher away, while Zohar journeyed even farther, becoming an ultra-Orthodox rabbi and moving to Jerusalem.
In the Eighties and Nineties, few Israeli films were made. The local film funds actually paid theaters to show Israeli movies, compensating them for the air conditioning and heating in the empty theaters. Several Israeli producers made their mark in Hollywood, notably Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, whose production company churned out hundreds of genre films in the Eighties and Nineties. But in Israel, one of the few hits during these two decades was Beyond the Walls (1984), Uri Barbash’s highly political but crowd-pleasing prison drama about Israeli and Palestinian prisoners who form an alliance to fight the corrupt system. This film accounted for Israel’s only Oscar nod of the Eighties and Nineties.
As the Israeli film industry waned in the last decades of the 20th century, television was just getting started. Channel 1, the government channel, began broadcasting in the mid-Sixties, but most of its programming was news, documentaries and imported series, such as Dynasty and Dallas. In the late Eighties, the television landscape changed when a commercial channel, Channel 2, was permitted to broadcast, followed a few years later by another commercial channel, Channel 10.
What was notable about these channels, particularly Channel 2, was that they survived (and thrived) by selling ads, meaning they had to attract audiences. For the first time since the founding of the state, Israelis were in a position where being entertaining could make them big bucks, and, like Jews in the US movie industry at the beginning of the 20th century, they rose to the challenge. And, just as with the high-tech industry, television was a medium where great ideas paid off.
One such great idea was BeTipul, a series created by Hagai Levi, Ori Sivan and Nir Bergman in 2005, which featured a psychiatrist (played by the late actor Assi Dayan) treating patients. Each day of the week, he saw a different patient, and on the last day he sat down with his supervisor to discuss them and his own life. It ran five nights a week and it was so riveting and had such a low budget – since it had one set and a very small cast – that it was adapted in more than a dozen countries, notably the US in an Emmy-winning version called In Treatment on HBO.
The next high-profile adaptation was Hatufim (Prisoners of War), the story of Israeli POWs who are “turned” by their captors and work as enemy agents when they return home. With a few changes, it became Showtime’s Homeland.
Once the television industry heated up, a kind of cross-pollination began with the Israeli film industry. Actors, writers, directors and technicians got experience on the small screen, which resulted in more polished and much better feature films. After the success of In Treatment and Homeland, which won multiple Emmys, Hollywood television executives started to look east for good shows, or formats in TV jargon. Today, Israel is the third largest provider of television formats in the world.
Fauda, a drama produced by the YES cable network, about an Israeli counter-terrorism unit in the West Bank and the Palestinian terrorists and their families that they are pursuing, which is in Hebrew and Arabic, has become a huge hit on Netflix in a subtitled version. Dozens of drama, comedy and reality series from Israel are adapted to markets around the world every year.
In 2001, the government increased its contribution to the Israel Film Fund and other funds, and more filmmakers, some of whom had studied at the half-dozen film schools around the country, began to make terrific movies. The quality of Israeli films was recognized around the world, and at virtually every major film festival held anywhere in the world today, including Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Sundance, Berlin and Tribeca, Israeli films come home with prizes, often the top prizes.
In the past decade, four Israeli movies have been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscars: two films by Joseph Cedar, Beaufort (2007), about an Israeli unit in Lebanon, and Footnote (2011), the story of a rivalry between father-son Talmud scholars; Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), an animated documentary-drama, based on his experiences in the Lebanon War; and Ajami (2009), a movie co-directed by a Jew, Yaron Shani, and an Arab, Scandar Copti, about a tough neighborhood in Jaffa.
Crowd-pleasing films that examined the differences and similarities between Israel and its neighbors, such as Eran Riklis’ The Syrian Bride and Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (which was recently adapted into a Broadway musical), won dozens of awards all over the world.
More important than any prizes was the fact that all kinds of groups who had been outside the Tel Aviv elite who once dominated the industry started making movies, and suddenly we had the stories of ultra-Orthodox women (Fill the Void and The Wedding Plan by Rama Burshtein); Mizrahi, traditional Jews (Emil Ben-Shimon’s The Women’s Balcony); the gay community (Eytan Fox’s Yossi & Jagger, Walk on Water, The Bubble and Yossi); Georgians (Dover Koshashvili’s Late Marriage); Israeli Arabs (Maysaloun Hamoud’s In Between, Tawfik Abu Wael’s Thirst and Maha Haj’s Personal Affairs); the Druse (Adi Adwan’s Arabani); Iranians (Yuval Delshad’s Baba Joon) and so many others.
Israel produced great actors, some of whom, like the late Ronit Elkabetz, worked abroad in countries such as France and the US.
Another welcome development was the return of the veteran Israeli director Avi Nesher, who came back as triumphantly as he had left, with the 2004 film Turn Left at the End of the World, a coming-of-age drama about Indians and Moroccans in the Negev. Since then, he has made four features and a new film, The Other Story, which is set to open later this year.
While the international success of Israeli films and television shows is welcome, it is equally if not more important that these works actually entertain Israelis. Now, when Israelis want to have fun, they tune in to locally made movies and television shows in greater numbers than ever. Israeli movies sell millions of tickets per year domestically, a far cry from the time when theater owners had to be paid to screen them to empty houses. In 2014, Zero Motivation, a comedy by Talya Lavie about female soldiers, sold more tickets than any Hollywood film in Israel. And most people went to see it because it featured characters they could relate to, not because it won Best Narrative Feature and the Nora Ephron Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival.
It’s taken 70 years, but all the voices that have made Israel so complex are finally being heard – and celebrated – on both big and small screens. And we can look forward to another 70 years of very Israeli entertainment.
Who knows? Maybe Uri Zohar will even come back and make Peeping Toms 2, the ultra-Orthodox version.