Last update - 00:00 22/01/2008
Israeli film Beaufort nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Film
By Assaf Uni, Haaretz Correspondent, The Associated Press and Haaretz Staff
"Beaufort," an Israeli film describing events at an army post in the run-up to Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
The movie is based on the book "If Heaven Exists" by Ron Leshem and is directed by Joseph Cedar.
The film was nominated alongside "The Counterfeiters" from Austria, "Katyn" from Poland, "Mongol" from Kazakhstan and "12" from Russia. The ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on February 24.
Oshri Cohen, who plays the lead role in the movie, said the nomination shows that Israel is a significant part of world cinema. "Now everybody knows we are part of this thing called world cinema. Now it's
official," he said.
The last Israel film to be nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar was Uri Barbash's "Behind the Walls" in 1984. It did not win.
Cedar, who was born in the United States, won an award for best director in the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival for "Beaufort," which depicts the fear and futility felt by soldiers guarding the famed military outpost, after which the film is named.
Cedar said he was ecstatic over the nomination. He told reporters that time moved "very fast and very slow" at the same time when he heard his film was chosen. However, Cedar said he thought "The Counterfeiters," an Austrian movie about the Holocaust, had better chances of winning the Oscar.
Leshem told Israel Radio, "When I wrote the book, I knew it should be made into a movie, but I never imagined that it would go beyond the borders of Israel, as it seemed such an exclusively Israeli story."
Originally, Israel's nominee for the best foreign film of 2007 was "The Band's Visit," which won eight prizes, including best picture, at Israel's equivalent of the Oscars, the Ophir Awards. However, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the Oscars, disqualified the film on the grounds that more than 50 percent of the dialogue was in English.
Beaufort was a 12th century Crusader castle used as a fort by Lebanese militia until taken over in a bloody battle with Israel Defense Forces soldiers, who turned it into an army base.
The castle, which has a commanding view of the border and is visible from inside Israel, was off-limits to the filmmakers in Lebanon. Instead, they built a replica of the military outpost near a similar Crusader-era fortress in the Golan Heights.
The crew blew up their set for the film's ending, in which the troops leave Lebanon after leveling their fortifications in a controlled explosion.
"It seems pretty obvious that we're against war and that war is horrible hopefully there's something in my film that gives insight into a more specific nature of how absurd combat ... is," Cedar said upon receiving the prize.
Cedar was the first Israeli director to win the best director award in the Berlin festival.
In 2007, "West Bank Story," a short musical comedy about rival Palestinian and Israeli falafel stands in the West Bank, was awarded the Oscar for best live action short film.
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