This was the year Israel was finally going to win an Oscar for best foreign-language film, after coming close in seven previous nominations.
After all, Ari Folman’s animated psychological drama "Waltz with Bashir" had been named by the American National Society of Film Critics as the best overall picture of 2008, and had garnered a Golden Globe as best foreign-language film. So much for the “experts” or, if you prefer, the peculiar ways of Academy voters: Even after Japanese director Yojiro Takita walked off the stage Sunday night clutching the best foreign film Oscar for his film "Departures," he acknowledged in a backstage interview that "Waltz" had been the frontrunner all along.
For Israelis, an Oscar win would have meant almost as much as the country’s first Olympic medal. Folman, his wife and four animators attended the Oscar ceremony, while some 60 supporters, including Israeli diplomats and media, as well as the two German producers who raised half of the film’s budget, watched the broadcast at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
"Waltz With Bashir" focuses on a moment of national shame — the murder of scores of Palestinians by Lebanese Phalangists in the Israeli army-controlled Sabra and Shatila refugee camps — yet was embraced in Israel, drawing large audiences there. And on an official level, not only was the movie, like most Israeli films, financed with government funds, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been actively promoting "Waltz With Bashir," with diplomats insisting that it will actually help to bolster Israel’s image abroad.
"Our only problem is that Sony Pictures Classics doesn’t let us be more involved and help a little more,” said Yoram Morad, the Israeli consul in New York for cultural affairs, a few days before the Academy Awards ceremony.
The cultural arm of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency’s education department, in partnership with the New York-based Foundation for Jewish Culture, produced a viewer’s guide that is to be distributed through various American Jewish groups. And a description of the film on the Web page of Israel’s culture office in New York calls the film a “gripping” and “powerful denunciation of the senselessness of all wars.” For a nation that much of the world sees as brutal and militaristic, that’s either an astonishing admission or a savvy PR move.
Unless, of course, it’s both.
After a screening of the film at Hollywood’s Arclight Theatre during the Golden Globes weekend last month, Folman offered two reasons for the Israeli government’s positive response to the film: It made Israel look like a tolerant country, allowing soldiers to talk openly about their experiences in the war, and when it was screened in Europe it made many people there realize for the first time that it wasn’t the Israeli troops that committed the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres.
“This is the type of propaganda the Israeli government couldn’t buy for money,” Folman told the crowd, a day before winning the Golden Globe. “So they kept sending the movie out.”
David Saranga, the Israeli consul for media and public affairs in New York, said as much in a recent interview with JTA.
“One of the challenges is that people in the world see Israel as responsible for what happened in Sabra and Shatila, and this movie shows that it was Lebanese who killed Palestinians,” Saranga said. “Second, the fact that the person who is asking the tough questions is an Israeli shows the morality of the Israeli society and the Israeli soldiers. So it’s important to show what are the moral values that the Israelis and the Israeli soldiers have. So I don’t find it as something that can hurt our hasbara [public relations], not at all
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