The Israeli films that have made it to the Oscars

The extremely controversial and critically-acclaimed 5 Broken Cameras is directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi, and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards. It is a first-hand account from the perspective of five cameras (all of which ended up shot or smashed) that documented the protests and army raids in the village of Bil’in as a result of the construction of the West Bank barrier. 

This controversial film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary after it received worldwide attention for its powerful interviews with Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. The film was praised for its emphasis on the strength of the Israeli democracy, but received criticism from some officials who said it likens Israel to Nazi Germany because of the film’s heavy display of Palestinian suffering.

Nominated in the Best Short Film category at the 2015 Oscars, the intimate Israeli film Aya follows the story of a young woman who is mistaken for a private driver at the airport by a stranger. She’s fascinated by the opportunity for an adventure and agrees to take the man to his destination in Jerusalem. Six-time Academy Award-winning producer Arthur Cohn said the film is a “great artistic achievement of sensitivity in every regard, which makes this film so extraordinary”.

Footnote is a fictitious, dramatic portrayal of the relationship between a father and his son, both of whom are professors at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. The film received international praise for its eloquence and The New York Times noted the drama’s audacious topics of Zionism, academia, family life and “the way language functions as a bridge between the sacred and the profane”.

Shot on location at the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, this documentary short chronicles the intimate lives of some of the students - all hailing from extremely  diverse backgrounds and over  48 different countries between them. The parents of these children include over 300,000 transnational migrant workers, some authorized and others undocumented,  who have taken refuge in Israel. Strangers No More won Best Short Documentary at the Academy Awards in 2011.

Set in the Christian-and-Muslim Jaffa neighborhood, Ajami, the drama scored a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, making it the third year in a row that an Israeli film was up for an Oscar. Ajami focuses on the impoverished dynamics of the real-life community. Throughout the film, the dialogue switches between Arabic and Hebrew in a very realistic manner, while the narrator is an Israeli Arab boy, which gives Ajami that documentary-like feel. 

This powerful, animated documentary follows Israeli Ari Folman (who also directed the film) in search of his memories as a 19-year-old IDF soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War. It’s the first animated film to be nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category. 

Beaufort follows an isolated IDF unit located in the mountaintop post of Lebanon’s Beaufort Castle at the end of an 18-year conflict. Despite public criticism that some of the actors had never served, it is one of the most successful movies in Israeli film history (and the first to receive an Oscar nomination after a 24-year dry spell).

Directed by Uri Barbash, Beyond the Walls takes place in the high-security block of an Israeli prison. The film follows the conflict between Jewish and Arab prisoners, which eventually leads to an unlikely partnership.

Based on the actual events  of Operation Entebbe in 1976, this nail-biting film tracks the hijacked flight from Tel Aviv to Paris that took 248 passengers hostage in exchange for the release of 53 Palestinian militants imprisoned in Israel and four other countries.