Eytan Fox is a director, screenwriter, and producer. A graduate of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Film and Television Studies, New York-born Fox was two years old when his family moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem where he grew up. His university graduation project, Time Off (1990), was a film that explored same-sex relationships in the IDF – setting the creative and thematic tone of Fox’s later body of work. The film featured a new type of protagonist, fundamentally different to the Übermensch native-Israeli ‘sabra’ character that very much dominated Israeli film up to then. Time Off earned Fox top honours at the Munich International Festival of Film Schools, and to this day is seen as one of the most influential shorts ever made in Israel.
In 1994 Fox had his feature-length directorial debut with The Song of the Siren – a hugely successful big screen adaptation of author Irit Linor’s novel of the same title. In this film, Fox continued his reimagining of this new version of the Israeli film protagonist, whilst also further honing his artistic language by putting together a unique soundtrack mixing classic and contemporary Israeli pop-rock tunes – a choice that would continue underscore his later films. Throughout the ‘90s, Fox regularly collaborated with his spouse, screenwriter and journalist Gal Uchovsky who wrote one of the episodes for the miniseries Short Stories About Love (titled ‘Husband with a Heart’ / ‘ba’al ba’al lev’) which Fox directed. Uchovsky was also a writer on the smash hit TV series Florentine – a zeitgeist-defining cultural moment whose first season Fox also directed.
In 2002 Fox directed the TV movie Yossi and Jagger, starring Ohad Knoller and Yehuda Levi, that featured a gay love story between two infantry soldiers in the IDF and was in a way, a fleshed-out version of his student short, Time Off. The film was a runaway hit and was shown at countless festivals around the world. In 2004 Fox directed the thriller Walk on Water, that kicked off the Panorama section at the Berlin International Film Festival. In this film, Fox set out to explore the complex relationship between a Mossad agent (played by Lior Ashkenazi) and a German youth – the grandson of a Nazi war criminal who Ashkenazi’s character was hunting down – all this, against the backdrop of the second Palestinian intifada. The film was featured at multiple festivals worldwide, and to this day remains one of Israeli film’s greatest international success stories.
Highlights of Fox’s subsequent directorial credits include The Bubble (2006), Yossi (2012), Cupcakes (2013), and Sublet (2020), and TV series Always the Same Dream (2009), and Good Family (2014).
Joseph Cedar
Joseph Cedar is a director and screenwriter, and one of the most universally celebrated Israeli filmmakers. Cedar has won some of the most coveted awards at the world’s highest profile festivals, and two of his films have been nominated for an Oscar. New York-born Cedar moved to Israel with his family at the age of six and settled in Jerusalem. After graduating from the Hebrew University where he studied Philosophy and Theatre History, he went to New York where he studied film at NYU.
In 2000 he wrote and directed his first feature film, Time of Favour, earning critical and commercial acclaim, and winning a total of six Ophir awards, including Best Film and Best Screenplay. In 2004 Cedar’s follow-up, Campfire, came out – also to great critical and commercial fanfare. The film won a Special Mention at the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival whereas in Israel, it took home five Ophir awards including Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Director.
In 2007 he directed his third film, Beaufort, based on Ron Leshem’s novel If There’s a Heaven. At the heart of the film are the stories of IDF infantry soldiers who had manned the army’s northern outpost in the months leading up to the military’s withdrawal from Lebanon. Beaufort was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Feature Film category and won Cedar an award for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. Critics showered it with praise whereas viewers flocked to cinemas by the droves, as 300,000 Israelis are said to have watched it on the big screen.
Cedar’s fourth film, Footnote, followed in 2011 and also clinched an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Feature Film. The film also made the official selection for the Cannes Film Festival where it took him the award for Best Screenplay. In Israel, Footnote ruled that year’s Ophir awards, taking home a whopping nine trophies including Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Lead Actor (Shlomo Bar-Aba), and Best Supporting Actor (Lior Ashkenazi).
