Last update - 02:22 22/02/2008
My son, the Oscar nominated mensch
Take it from Tzippi Cedar. When your child is up for an Academy Award, you don't let a dress get in the way. Tzippi only secured her ticket a week ago to the Oscars, where son Joseph hopes his work Beaufort will win Sunday for Best Foreign Film. In all the commotion she didn't buy a dress for the awards ceremony, long known for its parade of designer outfits strolling down the red carpet. But that didn't deter her from accompanying Joseph the director as he enjoys his moment in the glamorous Hollywood limelight. "I'm going to wear what I wore to his wedding," she said, referring to his nuptials nine years ago to journalist Vered Kellner. "It's appropriate and it fits. Besides, I am going to be sitting with the stars, the real stars," she added, referring to the balcony level, far from where the Hollywood celebrities-or her son and the Beaufort cast-will be sitting.
Tzippi and her husband Chaim (Howard) are both accomplished professionals in their own right. Tzippi is a successful psychodramatist in the school system, while Chaim, a Hebrew University professor and Israel Prize laureate, last month received the 2008 Wolf Prize for "contributions to the control of gene expression and cancer research." However, since Joseph was nominated last month, they have quickly adjusted to the title "the parents of."
Both parents sat with Anglo File in their beautifully designed Jerusalem home ahead of Tzippi's flight to the U.S. this week. Throughout the evening, they were cautious because they promised the filmmaker, who last year won the Silver Bear award in Berlin for best director, that the interview would not be "too mushy." However, they still had plenty of stories to recount of their eldest son with an "outrageously vivid imagination beyond anything we could cope with." Chaim said, "We always wanted our kids to be creative, to be able to express themselves and we're happy Joseph has been able to realize that."
His mother described him as a precocious child who "was always making up stories, always had a drive to create." One time, in first grade, he came home with his clothes in rags because he wanted to feel "what it was like for a soldier coming back from battle." Three years later on Sabbatical in New York, Joseph convinced his teacher he couldn't speak English. "He couldn't read or write [in English] on the same level as the other fourth graders, so he pretended to speak in broken English, when of course, he was fluent," said Tzippi.
Yeshiva educated, Joseph once brought a donkey home during high school and gave free rides to the neighborhood kids. "He said 'mom, don't worry, it will stay outside-just give it lettuce,'" she recalled this week, laughing. "This was a kid who constantly needed stimulation."
Entertainment runs in the family. Tzippi, who is also an actress, used to run an after-school drama activity at the Israel Museum, which their other five children attended. Joseph, though, preferred film. The family was also constantly entertaining: at every Bar Mitzvah or wedding, the family would put on a show and for Joseph's Bar Mitzvah, the family put on a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - replete with dreamcoat and all. "He grew up in a house where entertainment and creativity are a value," his father said.
His youth also has informed his films. The Cedars immigrated from the U.S. in 1973 just months before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. They first lived in the religious Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit Vegan-said to be the inspiration for Cedar's 2004 film, Campfire, about a young widow who wants to found a new settlement in the West Bank. Joseph's family later settled in the German Colony, where they have lived for nearly 25 years. The family speaks English at home and says that Joseph is especially zealous about speaking only English to his two children, ages six and two-and-a-half - reading to them classics he grew up on like Curious George, Babar and The Berenstain Bears.
Indeed the Cedars prefer not to think of their son as famous but rather focus on his commitment to family, art and helping others. "I never thought one day he'd be famous. And I still don't want to think of him as famous," commented Tzippi. And it wasn't easy at first, according to his mother. "He was walking around with the script for HaHesder (Time of Favor) and he had doors slammed in his face. It was hard to watch, and he almost gave up but we encouraged him. Now, he's always happy to meet a kid with a script and I'm more proud of that."
The parents seem to enjoy their new found status and take it in stride. After HaHesder, his first film about a radical West Bank Rabbi, came out in 2000, an excited student stopped Tzippi and said, "Oh my God, is it true that you are [actor] Aki Avni's mother?" Tzippi answered a polite no and said she was Joseph Cedar's mother. "The girl looked at me," she recalled, laughing this week, "and said 'Who?'"
Though Joseph enjoys name recognition now, his parents won't make predictions about Sunday. They say they remain blown over by the depth of their son's latest movie - despite criticism that Beaufort isn't patriotic. "There are a lot of real gems in the movie and it was an honest movie," Chaim said. "It reflected what society around him was thinking." Ironically, Joseph didn't get Tzippi her ticket to the Oscars: They actually secured it from "someone who knows someone," because they didn't want Joseph to feel an additional pressure of having to get his parents tickets to the ceremony. But, they only got one ticket and so Chaim, it seems, will be home, watching the awards on television into the early hours of Monday morning.
Before she knew she was going, Tzippi compiled a list of 10 reasons why she didn't have to be at the Oscar ceremony and sent it to her son, as a kind of reminder that he didn't need to feel obligated to find her a ticket. At the top of the list: "Who needs the excitement?" She wrote him, "I have not had a dull moment in my life since I became a mother-thank God. Besides, I've managed for 65 years without attending an Oscar ceremony." Her son, she said, quickly replied. "Thanks," he wrote back, "not for the email but for the dreamcoat."