Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

‘Footnote’ to Represent Israel at the Oscars

‘Footnote’ director Joseph Cedar arrives at Cannes Film Festival in May. Courtesy of Getty Images.

After sitting out the Academy Awards in February, Israel is hoping for its fourth nomination in five years with “Footnote,” a drama that combines the worlds of academia and Talmudic study.

The film won top honors tonight at the Ophirs, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars, automatically becoming Israel’s submission in the foreign-language category at Hollywood’s Academy Awards. While Oscar nominations won’t be announced until January, “Footnote” can already be considered a front-runner, having been nominated for a Palme d’Or and taking home the best screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Joseph Cedar, who wrote the script and also directed the film, saw “Footnote” claim nine Ophirs. Should the movie be nominated for an Oscar, it’ll be his second trip to the Academy Awards — his previous feature-length movie, “Beaufort,” was one of the five foreign-language finalists at the 2008 Oscars.

In contrast to Israel’s recent Oscar submissions, which have all focused on Arab-Jewish tensions, “Footnote” offers a very different angle on Israeli society, exploring the insular worlds of academia and Talmudic study. The film tells the story of father-and-son religious scholars locked into a rivalry in Jerusalem.

The best documentary Ophir went to “The Apartment,” Arnon Goldfinger’s film about history, memory and family, explored through the Bauhaus apartment of his grandparents, who immigrated to Israel before the 1948 founding of the state.

Notable among the technical-prize winners was “Rabies,” a drama billed as Israel’s first horror film when it screened earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. Simultaneously scary and satirical, the movie — a hit among New York viewers — won the Ophir for best makeup.

Read the Forward’s review of “Footnote” here, “The Apartment” here, and “Rabies” here.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.