Israeli Cinema: From Propaganda to New Wave and Beyond

The Heroic Era

Israeli cinema began as an instrument of nation-building. In the 1950s, films served the Zionist project by celebrating kibbutz life, military heroism, and the pioneering spirit. Productions like Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955) — Israel’s first major feature film — depicted the 1948 War of Independence with the clear-eyed patriotism that the young state demanded.

These early films were technically modest but culturally significant. They helped forge a national identity, presenting the sabra — the native-born Israeli, tough on the outside, tender within — as the ideal citizen. The films rarely questioned the national narrative or explored the perspectives of those excluded from it.

The Bourekas Era

In the 1960s and 1970s, a distinctly Israeli popular cinema emerged in the form of Bourekas films. Named after the Sephardic pastry, these comedies and melodramas centered on ethnic tensions — typically, the clash between Ashkenazi (European) and Mizrachi (Middle Eastern) Jewish cultures.

Films like Sallah Shabati (1964), starring Chaim Topol, used humor to address real social inequalities. The Mizrachi protagonist, dismissed by the Ashkenazi establishment, ultimately triumphs through cunning and charm. These films were enormously popular domestically, though critics dismissed them as lowbrow entertainment.

The Bourekas era also produced a wave of exploitation and action films, many directed by Menahem Golan, who would later co-found the Cannon Group and bring his Israeli sensibility to Hollywood B-movies.

The Political Turn

The 1980s saw Israeli cinema begin to engage critically with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Films like Beyond the Walls (1984), which depicted Israeli and Palestinian prisoners forming an unlikely alliance, and Avanti Popolo (1986), which humanized Egyptian soldiers during the Six-Day War, signaled a willingness to explore perspectives previously excluded from Israeli cinema.

This political turn accelerated after the First Intifada (1987) and the Oslo Accords (1993). Filmmakers increasingly questioned the national narrative, exploring the occupation, military service, and the moral costs of conflict with an honesty that earlier generations would not have attempted.

The New Wave

From the late 1990s onward, Israeli cinema experienced a remarkable creative surge. A new generation of filmmakers — trained in Israeli and international film schools, influenced by European art cinema, and determined to engage honestly with their country’s contradictions — produced films that earned international acclaim.

Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), an animated documentary about suppressed memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, received an Oscar nomination and played at festivals worldwide. Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (2009), set entirely inside a tank during the same war, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Joseph Cedar’s Footnote (2011), a dark comedy about academic rivalry between father and son, was nominated for the Academy Award.

These films shared certain qualities: visual ambition, moral complexity, and a refusal to offer easy answers about Israeli identity or the conflict. They treated their subjects — soldiers, settlers, academics, immigrants — as fully human, flawed, and worthy of empathy.

Documentary Tradition

Israeli documentary filmmaking has produced particularly powerful work. Films like The Gatekeepers (2012), featuring interviews with six former heads of the Shin Bet security service, and 5 Broken Cameras (2011), co-directed by a Palestinian and an Israeli, brought international attention to the conflict through deeply personal narratives.

The documentary tradition has been especially important for Mizrachi filmmakers exploring the suppressed history of Jews from Arab countries. Films about the Yemenite children affair, the transit camps of the 1950s, and the cultural discrimination faced by Mizrachi immigrants have added previously absent perspectives to Israeli cinema.

Legacy

Israeli cinema has evolved from a tool of national mythology to one of the world’s most vital and challenging national film traditions. Its willingness to examine uncomfortable truths — about the occupation, ethnic discrimination, military culture, and the gap between democratic ideals and daily reality — distinguishes it from the cinema of many countries that prefer to celebrate national achievements.

For international audiences, Israeli films offer a window into a society that is simultaneously ancient and modern, democratic and militarized, creative and conflicted. The best Israeli cinema does what all great art does: it makes the specific universal, turning the particular dilemmas of one small country into stories that resonate everywhere.