Hebrew Cinema: The New Wave That Conquered the Festivals

A national cinema that argues with itself

Israeli film grew up in public, in a country still deciding what it was. The early decades gave it the bourekas comedies, broad ethnic farces about Mizrahi and Ashkenazi families colliding, and the earnest Zionist adventure pictures that treated the land itself as a character. For a long time the international art world ignored all of it. Then, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, something shifted. A generation of directors trained at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem film schools stopped trying to be either propagandists or imitators of Europe, and started filming the specific, the bruised, the unresolved.

What makes this cinema distinct is its refusal of comfort. The army is everywhere and almost never heroic. Religion is treated as a closed world worth understanding rather than mocking. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is filmed not as geopolitics but as something that happens at checkpoints, in living rooms, between fathers and sons. The animated war film Waltz with Bashir did what conventional features could not: it made the trauma of the Lebanon war legible to audiences far outside Israel.

The export story is real. Israeli features have been nominated for the foreign-language Oscar repeatedly over a single decade, an astonishing strike rate for a country its size, and Israeli television formats (the originals behind Homeland and In Treatment) quietly reshaped American prestige TV. This is a cinema that punches far above its population, and it knows it.

The auteurs who built the new wave

No single figure dominates, which is part of the point. Amos Gitai is the elder statesman and the most European, a former architect who films long takes and historical wounds with equal patience (Kadosh, Kippur). Joseph Cedar brought a chilly intellectual precision to the military and the academy alike, turning a feud between Talmud scholars in Footnote into something with the tension of a thriller. Ari Folman reinvented the war documentary as animation in Waltz with Bashir. Samuel Maoz put the audience inside a tank for the whole of Lebanon, then a decade later folded grief and bureaucracy into the formal structure of Foxtrot.

The women of this cinema matter just as much. Ronit Elkabetz, actor and co-director, made the Amsalem trilogy that climaxed in Gett, a near-single-room courtroom film about a woman who cannot obtain a divorce under religious law. Nadav Lapid is the provocateur, all jagged camera and fury at the nation that made him (Synonyms, The Kindergarten Teacher). And Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit found, in an Egyptian police orchestra stranded in a nowhere desert town, the gentlest film this country has made about the people on the other side of every wall.