DANCE OF DESPAIR Israel, Trauma and Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot
At the Ophir Awards – the Israeli counterpart of the Oscars – in September, Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot (2017) won eight statues, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and a Best Actor award for lead Lior Ashkenazi. It also won the Silver Lion (Grand Jury Prize) at the Venice Film Festival, and was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, though it didn’t make the final five nominees. In spite of all this acclaim – or, if you’re feeling cynical, because of – Foxtrot was hugely controversial in its homeland. Due to its critical depiction of life in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), it became a magnet for criticism from right-wing politicians.
Israeli minister of culture Miri Regev – a former IDF spokesperson – decreed Foxtrot a work ‘of self-flagellation and cooperation with the anti-Israel narrative’ and accused Maoz of ‘contributing to the incitement of the younger generation while lying under the guise of art’. Israel’s embassy in Paris sent no representatives to a local Israeli film festival held in March because Foxtrot was screening. As always, what angered the powers that be wasn’t just the act of critiquing Israeli military policy, or the overseas embrace of a film doing so, but that Foxtrot, like most Israeli films, had received state funding. But Maoz has offered that his criticisms have come ‘out of love’ and posited that societies suffer when nationalism becomes a tool for shutting down debate: when ‘critics [are] considered to be traitors, you have no chance of rising’.
Maoz first found acclaim with his debut feature, Lebanon (2009). The film depicts Israeli soldiers fighting in the 1982 Lebanon War, with the action told entirely fromtanks to enter Lebanon’, and he can’t forget the moment he was ordered to fire on a truck that turned out to be a civilian vehicle. Decades later, the director made a film based on these experiences as a way to work through their lingering ramifications: ‘[Lebanon] helped me to try and understand what it means to kill other human beings […] taking lives is an excruciating burden I am forced to live with.’
