Oscar Foreign Entry Flap; The Runner-Up

One month ago, from the stage of Israel's annual equivalent to the Oscars, the Israeli Academy for Film's Ophir Awards, actor and television host Mino Moshonov made what one account called the "saddest" comment of the night. "How is it that movies have gotten so good?" he asked the audience, "We used to have a great country and lousy films. Now, we have great films..."

Audience laughter finished the joke for him. His remark could be taken to refer specifically to the two movies that were vying most heavily for the Ophir as best film--a win that (normally) guarantees that picture will stand in as Israel's candidate for one of five prized nominations in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the Oscars. No Israeli film has been nominated since Beyond the Walls in 1984 and no Israeli film has ever won the statuette.

The winner, as covered by the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein in the kind of dilemma-posing column he still does better (as our long friendship will not deter me from saying) than anybody in the business, was first-time director Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit, which begins a platforming release from Sony Pictures Classics on December 7.

Not only did the offbeat, never quite too-cute comedy about an Egyptian police band that ends up as the unlikely guests of a windblown Israeli desert town, win best picture, it also swept up Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Best Score and Costume Design.

Great--except, as Goldstein acerbically relates, it contains more than 50 percent of its dialog in English and thus is flat-out ineligible (so the Academy reps insist) for the prize.

It's a controversy that surfaced in the Israeli media in mid-summer, was covered by Nikki Finke in her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, and is now brought into high relief by Goldstein's pointed commentary. Depending how responsive the Academy is to Goldstein's challenge ("I think the Academy should take its 44-page rule book and throw it out the window.") the brouhaha could twitter on for weeks as a compact but agonizing struggle between the advocates of film quality per se, and the gatekeepers.

That said, It's not like the runner-up film, now the Oscars entry, is chopped liver. In fact, before Kolirin's film made its run, Jerusalem Post reviewer and film doyenne Hannh Brown was touting director Joseph Cedar's effort this way: "But if you long for the day when an Israeli film will take home (or at least be nominated for) an Oscar...Beaufort, which opens in Israel next Thursday and which recently won the Best Director Award at the Berlin Film Festival, may well be that movie."

Beaufort is a classic war drama, a close look at the desperation and courage as well as the more intimate moments shared by a group of Israeli Defense Force soldiers trapped in the Crusader-era castle site of Beaufort, during the withdrawal of the IDF from the south Lebanon border in 2000 after nearly two decades of occupation. Cedar and collaborator Ron Leshem wrote it concurrently with Leshem's work on the novel, If There Is A Heaven (which won Israel's most prestigious literary award, the Sapir Prize, last year); the story is fact-based, and the result of 18 rewrites that skewed it well away from the novel.

Hannah Brown said Cedar's Silver Bear win at Berlin (the director is an observant Jew and was incommunicado when festival officials were trying to inform him) "simply confirmed that Cedar had done it: He had made the first major Israeli war film... no one had made a war movie with this kind of impact."

She added,

Anyone who follows the Israeli movie scene knew very well that Beaufort was likely to be a breakout success at Berlin. That is because Cedar's previous two films, Time of Favor (Hahesder) (2000) and Campfire (Medurat Hashevet) (2004), which both won the Ophir Award for Best Picture (the Israeli Oscar) and opened abroad to acclaim (Campfire won a Special Mention at Berlin in 2004), were among the most original and well-made films that have come out of Israel.

The claustrophobia of being stuck in one place with nothing to do but be shot at - which is as much a part of modern warfare as dramatic battles - has never been shown quite like this.

Although Cedar was not at Beaufort, he served as a paratrooper and medic in the late 1980s and spent time in Lebanon, where he lost two friends.

Cedar's own service--he was born and partly raised in the States and emigrated with his family to Israel--helped him ride out the controversy that arose when media reports disclosed that most of his actors had not served in the army. He replied that only one-third hadn't, and put the blame on the IDF's inefficient recruiting.

Cedar wrapped filming about a month before the second Lebanon War broke out this past summer. Kino Films plans an early 2008 platform release of Beaufort beginning in New York, Los Angeles and Boston.

Kolirin's film has properly won plaudits for eschewing overt political messages: "To Kolirin's everlasting credit, he never tries to teach a lesson about Israeli-Arab relations," said Brown's review. She finds other, perhaps stronger virtues in Cedar's film, and perhaps cues us to ponder what resonance it could ill have with our own adventure in Iraq:

It's impossible to watch the film without thinking about mistakes that were made by the IDF brass in both Lebanon wars. But asked to comment on this, Cedar said, "Of course the government is not sensitive enough to individual human life. Of course it's not sensitive. It's a government. That's banal. What's more interesting is why these soldiers want to be there. What mechanism does our society give them that turns them into war machines and overrides their survival instinct? I don't have an answer, but the film tries to deal with that."

"It's obvious we're against war and it's horrible," said Cedar. "Hopefully this film will give insight into the specific nature of how absurd combat and war is."

Exactly the sort of sentiment that the Department of Defense chicken hawks are loathe to hear. But in a year of continuing national divisiveness over our own war--and taking nothing away from the sweetness and grace of Kolirin's s film, nor from Goldstein's points about Academy rules rigidity----perhaps the more important Israeli film is actually the one now headed for Oscar consideration.

(Joseph Cedar wins the SIlver Bear award for Directing, Berlin Film Festival; photo by Axel Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)