Foxtrot is Israel’s official submission for the Oscars
by Orr Sigoli
- Samuel Maoz’s Silver Lion winner has been chosen by the Israeli Academy of Film and Television to represent the country in the race for the 2018 Best Foreign-language Film Oscar
After its Best Picture win at the Ophir Awards, Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot [+see also:
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interview: Matan Yair
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interview: Savi Gabizon
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Foxtrot is Maoz’s follow-up to his first feature, the 2009 Golden Lion winner Lebanon [+see also:
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film profile]. His new film tells the story of two generations of Israeli men: a father (Lior Ashkenazi, who won the Ophir Award for Best Lead Actor), who is dealing with his own traumas from his military service while trying to keep his marriage alive, and his young soldier son (Yonatan Shiray), stationed at a remote military checkpoint.
The film received rave reviews at the latest Venice Film Festival, where it won a Silver Lion, the Grand Jury Prize, and later showed up at the Telluride Film Festival. Back home in Israel, the film stirred up quite a controversy after the country’s Minister of Culture, Miri Regev, publicly attacked the film for its “false depiction of the Israel Defense Force”. The Academy was not fazed by this and voted for Foxtrot as the best film of the year for its magnificent artistic visuals and poignant human drama.
Foxtrot is an Israeli-German-French-Swiss co-production by Pola Pandora Filmproduktions, Spiro Films, ASAP Films and KNM. The co-production companies are Bord Cadre Films and Arte France Cinéma. The producers are Israel’s Eitan Mansuri (The Congress [+see also:
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Israel has been nominated ten times for the Oscars (its latest entry to get a nod was Footnote, also starring Ashkenazi), but it has never won, making it the category’s biggest loser to date.
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