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With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories
(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States.
On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class — how to use a Palestinian story?”
Kashua was smiling on Zoom as he said it — he is, after all, known for his often fatalistic sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the author had given his blessing for Kolirin to make an adaptation of his novel “Let It Be Morning,” and said he loved the final result.
But like most jokes, this one had a kernel of truth: Israel’s two most recent Oscar submissions, hitting New York’s Quad Cinema within a week of each other, both — to varying degrees — tell Palestinian stories.
“Let It Be Morning” is a dark comedy about an Arab Israeli village that has suddenly and with no explanation been cordoned off from the rest of the country by the Israeli military. This event forces its Palestinian residents, including a protagonist trying to return to his comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem, to reckon with how their dignity as citizens has been denied to them by the mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. At the Quad, the film is accompanied by a retrospective of Kolirin’s work, including “The Band’s Visit,” the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical; the retrospective is sponsored by the Israeli consulate in New York.
The all-female cast of “Cinema Sabaya,” a mix of Jewish and Arab actresses, in a film directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
The following week will see the opening of Rotem’s film, “Cinema Sabaya.” It follows a group of eight women, some Jewish and some Arab and Palestinian, who bond with each other while taking a filmmaking class in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera. Cast member Dana Ivgy, who plays the class’s instructor, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the filming experience “felt like how living in Israel should feel,” adding, “We have more women in the film than in the Israeli government.”
Stylistically, the two films couldn’t be more different. “Let It Be Morning” is a tightly plotted narrative with boldly realized characters; almost all of its dialogue is in Arabic. “Cinema Sabaya” is a loose, heavily improvisational piece that is almost entirely set in one room, and is mostly in Hebrew (although in one tense early scene, the characters debate whether to conduct their class in Hebrew or Arabic). One is a dry, Kafkaesque satire; the other is an intimate, naturalistic drama.
But together, the films provide a snapshot of the delicate dance Israeli filmmakers must perform in the current climate. On the one hand, these art-house directors are being feted on the international stage for their empathetic storytelling that incorporates or even centers entirely on Palestinian characters. But on the other, they’re being attacked by government officials for their perceived insufficient loyalty — and their films’ very status as “Israeli” is being questioned, too, sometimes by their own cast and crew.
“Everyone can call it what they want,” Rotem said of her film. “I’m an Israeli and it’s in Israel, but I have partners who call themselves Palestinians, and some of them call themselves Arabs, and each one defined herself. I think it’s really how it should be.”
“A film does not have an identity,” Kolirin insisted in an interview with JTA. “It is a citizen of the screen.”
Eran Kolirin accepted the award for Best Director for “Let It Be Morning” at the 2021 Ophir Awards in Tel Aviv on October 5, 2021. (Tomer Neuberg/ Flash90)
Kolirin isn’t a fan of the label “Israeli film” in this case, even though that is how “Let It Be Morning” was categorized at its 2021 Cannes Film Festival premiere; its own press notes also list Israel as the “country of production.” That Cannes screening took place shortly after Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas that killed more than 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and around a dozen Israelis. The events turned Cannes into a political firestorm when the film’s Palestinian cast refused to attend the premiere.
“We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry into Cannes under the label of an ‘Israeli film’ when Israel continues to carry its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and apartheid against us — the Palestinian people,” the cast’s statement read in part.
“Each time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship,” the statement continues, calling on “international artistic and cultural institutions” to “amplify the voices of Palestinian artists and creatives.”
Kolirin himself supported the cast’s action. He knew they were grieving over the outbreak of violence in Gaza and didn’t want to put themselves in a situation where “some politician is going to wave a flag over their head or whatever.”
What’s more, he said, the status of “Let It Be Morning” as an “Israeli” film, despite the fact that around half the crew was Palestinian, was not his decision: “The film was not submitted to Cannes as an Israeli film,” he said. “You know, you fill in the form: ‘Which were the countries that gave money?’” In this case, the answer was Israel and France.
Most of the cast later did not attend the Ophir Awards ceremony, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars voted on by its filmmaking academy, where “Morning” won the top prize (which automatically made it Israel’s Oscar submission for that year). In solidarity at the awards, Kolirin read aloud a statement from his lead actress, Juna Suleiman, decrying Israel’s “active efforts to erase Palestinian identity” and what she called “ethnic cleansing.”
Orit Fouks Rotem (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Cinema Sabaya” hasn’t played host to as much offscreen controversy, but its vision of Israeli multiculturalism is still inherently political. Rotem’s mother is a local government adviser on women’s issues in Hadera, and the film was inspired by her experience participating in a photography class designed to unite Jewish and Arab women. Rotem herself later led filmmaking classes in a similar vein as research for “Sabaya.”
In the film, Ivgy’s character, who is modeled on Rotem, instructs her class to film their home lives, while secretly hoping to make a movie from their efforts. When her desire to do so is revealed, the women in the class feel betrayed: They thought they were just making films for themselves, not for their stories to be told by someone else.
Similarly, Rotem said that working with Arab and Palestinian actresses made her “aware to the fact that I can’t really tell their story.” Her solution was to allow the performers — some of whom are well-known activists who had to think twice about appearing in an Israeli movie — to voice their own opinions, and to establish the necessary trust to allow them to be unscripted on camera.
She theorizes that “Cinema Sabaya” has been so well received in Israel because “it doesn’t say ‘occupation, occupation, occupation.’ It says ‘humanity,’ so people are less afraid.” (She also noted that, in real life, the women who attended her filmmaking classes bristled at her initial suggestion to make a documentary about them, telling her to fictionalize their stories instead — which she did.)
Lately the Israeli government has a tendency to view its filmmaking class as agitators unworthy of national support, particularly when they make films criticizing the occupation. Former Culture Minister Miri Regev often disparaged films she thought were bad for Israel, including celebrated international hits such as “Foxtrot” and “Synonyms.” Her current successor, Miki Zohar, has already threatened the makers of a new documentary about the West Bank city of Hebron, saying the movie smears the military and that the directors might have to return government funds.
In recent years, Israel’s culture ministry has pushed two new controversial proposals: a grant program earmarked for those who make films in settlements, which are considered illegal under international law; and a form pledging not to make films “offensive” to Israel or the military that filmmakers would be required to sign in order to apply for certain grants, which many directors have likened to a loyalty oath. For years, some of the country’s largest grantmakers have required applicants to sign a form promising to represent their projects as Israeli on the national stage.
There has also been an effort among some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government to end funding to public broadcaster Kan, which the country’s film industry views as another attack on its free expression.
“Kan has all this dialogue,” Ivgy said. “It has Jewish and religious and Arab and Palestinian, for kids and for grownups. And nothing is taboo there. I feel that it’s very dangerous to close that option down.”
Many Israeli filmmakers are fighting back. Hundreds, including Kolirin and Rotem, have refused to sign the ministry’s pledge, and many have also protested the settlement grant program. Nadav Lapid, one of the country’s most celebrated and outspoken directors, harshly critiqued government restrictions placed on his own work in the 2021 drama “Ahed’s Knee,” which went on to win a special prize at Cannes.
Kolirin said he had recently been on a call with several Israeli filmmakers looking to further organize against artistic restrictions, and that it had given him hope. “I had this feeling of some optimism, which I didn’t have for a long time,” he said. But he didn’t mince words when discussing Israel’s new governing coalition, which he likened to “a circus of mad dogs unleashed.”
Rotem said that the current government is “very, very bad and scary,” but that it has only strengthened her resolve to make political films.
“For me, it’s also political to show women in Israel in a deep way: I mean Arabs and Jews,” she said. “Because I don’t think there are enough films that are doing that.”
For Kashua, a veteran TV writer and opinion columnist, the question of identity in Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking is even more pronounced. After a long career of trying to write about the Palestinian experience in Hebrew as a way of reaching Israelis, he left Israel for the United States in 2014, becoming discouraged by an incident in which Jewish extremists burned a Palestinian teenager alive as revenge after Palestinian terrorists kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Now based in St. Louis, he has worked as a writer and story editor on Israeli series that center on both Palestinian and Jewish stories — including the global hit “Shtisel,” which focuses on haredi Orthodox Jews, and its upcoming spinoff, along with “Madrasa,” a young-adult series about a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school.
Israeli filmmakers choosing to center Palestinian stories can be its own radical political act, Kashua believes. He noted that the dialogue in “Morning” is almost entirely in Arabic, a language that Israel demoted from national language status in 2018 — doubly ironic as he had deliberately chosen to write his original novel in Hebrew.
“The idea that this film is ‘Israeli’ — it really contradicts the idea of Israel being a purely Jewish state,” Kashua said. He added that, while he had initially hoped a Palestinian director might have adapted his novel, he was ultimately happy with Kolirin’s approach.
“I truly love the movie, and it’s barely Orientalist,” he joked, echoing Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s famous book about how a Western lens on Eastern cultures can be reductive and harmful. “Which is a big achievement for an Israeli filmmaker.”
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The post With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump-MBS Dealmaking Shaped Gaza Vote at UN, Empowering Hamas, Israeli Analysts Warn
US President Donald Trump greets Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, during a dinner at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Nov. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
This week’s UN Security Council resolution endorsing US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan was timed to appease Western and Arab governments and deliberately crafted to blur the question of Palestinian statehood in pursuit of broader regional interests, according to Israeli analysts, who warned the move risked empowering Hamas and endangering Israel’s security.
Einat Wilf, a former member of Israel’s parliament, known as the Knesset, said the UN resolution intended to remove the Palestinian question from the headlines but could lay the groundwork for “another Oct. 7,” referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, by repeating the same policy of ambiguity that allowed the Palestinian terrorist organization to regroup under previous ceasefire agreements.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), argued the vote was strategically timed to coincide with Trump’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Washington. The US president sought to pair international endorsement of his 20-point Gaza plan with Saudi commitments toward normalizing relations with Israel. Bin Salman, also known as MBS, told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that he was open to joining the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered Arab-Israel normalization agreements, if credible progress toward Palestinian statehood could be demonstrated.
The Trump administration aimed to show that the “pathway to implementing Stage Two of the Gaza plan — which includes the International Stabilization Force and a framework for Palestinian statehood — is already in place,” Diker told The Algemeiner in a phone call. “The goal was to get international sanction through the UN so the White House could silence naysayers who claim the plan is a Trump-Israel conspiracy.”
A new poll conducted by the JCFA ahead of the Security Council vote found that 70% percent of Israelis opposed the creation of a Palestinian state under current conditions, with opposition rising to just under 80% among Jewish Israelis. Even when linked to Saudi normalization, the overwhelming majority (62%) remained opposed.
According to Diker, the UN resolution was largely declarative and would not bring the region closer to a Palestinian state. The real agenda rested with Saudi-US ties, with MBS telling Trump that Saudi investments in the United States would increase to nearly $1 trillion. Palestinian statehood figured mostly as lip service, and while Israel signed on, the Palestinian leadership in the form of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has proven incapable of governing its own public, with polling consistently showing Hamas as the preferred choice among Palestinians — both in Gaza and the West Bank.
“It’s an ironic development that the great Western powers pushing for a Palestinian state are essentially strengthening Hamas’s hand as the effective leadership of the Palestinian people following the Oct. 7 massacres,” he said.
Wilf, who recently announced her return to politics with her newly formed Oz party, argued that Washington’s goal is to push the Palestinian issue “off the headlines” long enough to advance its broader Middle East agenda.
“The Abraham Accords are no longer about normalizing relations with Israel,” she said in a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. “It’s basically American shorthand for bringing the Islamic and Arab world into the Western orbit in a more structured way and pulling them as much as possible away from China.”
Wilf warned that while Washington’s approach of “constructive ambiguity — the vague language now anchoring the resolution — may serve its short-term strategic goals for the conflict, it puts Israel at risk. By avoiding clear definitions of what a reformed Palestinian Authority or a de-radicalized Gaza would mean, she argued, the resolution leaves the same loopholes that allowed Hamas to rebuild in the past.
The deeper problem, Wilf argued, is a pervasive Palestinian ideology built on rejecting Jewish sovereignty. Until that changes, efforts toward statehood will remain hollow, a dynamic she summed up as “Schrödinger’s Palestine” — a state when it comes to attacking Israel in international forums but not a state when it comes to taking responsibility for its own actions.
Diker said the tension Wilf described has already become a “built-in collision” between Western diplomacy and Palestinian realities.
“The West is acting in a rather colonialist manner by refusing to note the democratic choice of the Palestinian people,” he said. “Oct. 7 was Hamas’s crowning achievement to ultimately uproot and replace the Fatah-led leadership of the Palestinian street.”
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Iran ‘Has No Choice’ but to Move Capital as Water Crisis Deepens, Says President
People shop water storage tanks following a drought crisis in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 10, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian affirmed on Thursday that the country “has no choice” but to relocate its capital, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain — even as the regime spends billions of dollars rebuilding its military and nuclear infrastructure and backing its terrorist proxies.
In a televised national address, the Iranian leader renewed his call to relocate the capital, asserting that the deepening crisis has “rendered the city uninhabitable.”
Pezeshkian said Iran’s water, land, and infrastructure systems are under such extreme pressure that relocating the capital is now unavoidable, adding that when the move was first proposed, the government lacked even a minimal budget to pursue it.
“The truth is, we have no choice left — relocating the capital is now a necessity,” he said during his speech.
With parts of the city sinking up to 30 centimeters a year and water supplies dwindling, Pezeshkian described Tehran’s current situation as a “catastrophe.”
He urged government ministries and public officials to coordinate their efforts to avert a grim future for the country.
“Protecting the environment is not a game,” the Iranian leader said.
“Ignoring it is signing our own destruction,” he continued, explaining that Tehran can no longer cope with population growth or the city’s expanding construction.
Among the solutions considered to tackle the crisis, one has been importing water from the Gulf of Oman. However, Pezeshkian noted that such an approach is extremely costly, with each cubic meter costing millions to deliver to Tehran.
Earlier this year, the Iranian regime announced it was considering relocating the capital to the Makran coast in the country’s south, a remote region overlooking the Gulf of Oman, in a bid to ease Tehran’s congestion and alleviate its water and energy shortages.
Advocates of this initiative emphasize its strategic benefits, including direct access to the Indian Ocean and significant economic potential through maritime trade, centered on the port of Chabahar, Iran’s crucial gateway to Central Asia.
However, critics argue that the region is still underdeveloped, fraught with security risks, and unprepared to function as a capital, warning that the move could cost tens of billions of dollars — an amount the country cannot bear amid economic turmoil, soaring inflation, and renewed United Nations sanctions.
Notably, the Iranian regime has focused its resources on bolstering its military and nuclear programs rather than addressing the country’s water crisis, a choice that has left citizens’ needs unmet while advancing its agenda against Israel.
The regime has also spent billions of dollars supporting its terrorist proxies across the region and operations abroad, with the Quds Force, Iran’s elite paramilitary unit, funneling funds to the Lebanese group Hezbollah, in defiance of international sanctions.
According to the US Treasury Department, Iran has provided more than $100 million per month to Hezbollah so far this year alone, with $1 billion representing only a portion of Tehran’s overall support for the terrorist group, using a “shadow financial system” to transfer funds to Lebanon.
Iran also provides weapons, training, logistical support, and political backing to the group along with other proxies, including Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, various militias in Iraq and Syria, and other Islamist entities.
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A shocking true story of Mexico’s Jewish community comes to Netflix
Growing up in Paris, an Italian castle, South Africa at the dawn of its civil rights movement and a kibbutz in the then-new state of Israel sounds like it would be enriching, the project of idealistic parents who wanted their children to see the world and witness history. But that wasn’t exactly how it unfolded for Tamara Trottner, née Salzberg, and her brother Isaac.
Instead, they lived in these locations for three years because they were on the run with their father Leo (Emiliano Zurita), who was being hunted by Interpol for kidnapping his own children. He had taken them to retaliate against his wife, Valeria (Tessa Ia), after she had an affair with his brother-in-law.
Trottner wrote a memoir about the experience and it has been adapted into a gripping and sumptuously-filmed Spanish-language miniseries, No One Saw Us Leave, which recently arrived on Netflix.
In the opening episode, we see a stylish wedding between a young Valeria and Leo, both children of leaders of Mexico City’s small Ashkenazi Jewish community. As she prepares to walk down the aisle, Valeria’s mother tells her she is destined to have “a sheyne lebn” — a beautiful life, in Yiddish — and the crowd dances to “Hava Negila.”
But even at their wedding, there’s little warmth between the two; their marriage is closer to a merger between their two families, and while they don’t hate each other, there’s little mutual understanding — Leo believes Valeria should be the woman of the house, but she is tapped into the burgeoning feminism of the 1960s and wants to get a Master’s degree.
We switch between flashbacks of the pair’s marriage — we see the beginnings of Valeria’s affair, as she dances with her brother-in-law Carlos — and Leo’s international run with his children, Tamara and Leo. Though the children, who begin the voyage aged 5 and 7, constantly ask about their mother, he alternates between telling them that she is coming to join them soon and that she did “something bad” and doesn’t want to see them anymore. In fact, Valeria is searching desperately, and has hired an ex-Mossad agent (Ari Brickman) to aid her in the international hunt.
It’s an emotional and suspenseful story as Leo routinely manages to evade the international police. But the subtle story driving all of the drama is that of the tight-knit Jewish community in Mexico City — even today, only 3% of Mexican Jews marry outside the community — and the interplay of respectability and influence within it.
As part of his retribution against Valeria — and to protect his own reputation as he flees Mexico — Leo spreads a story that his wife was unstable and an unfit mother, even alleging that she had been committed to a psychiatric facility. For at least the first episode of the show, the audience, too, is unsure why Leo has really taken the children, and the story about Valeria seems plausible; we’re not sure who to stand with.
The rest of the Jewish community, too, is unsure; at first, people ice out Valeria and her family as they try to gain information about the children’s whereabouts. The push and pull between two powerful families leaves the community confused and caught in the middle. And after Valeria launches a publicity campaign to clear her name and solicit clues, many of the other leaders worry about the damage to the community’s public image in Mexico, alluding to the European antisemitism they fled from. Leo’s father, meanwhile, is a domineering figure who asserts that his daughter-in-law’s affair is just as bad a blow to the community’s reputation as the kidnapping.
The confusion is helped by the fact that Leo is not presented as a villain; he’s a well-developed character, with his own issues with his marriage and with his overbearing father. An ardent socialist, we see him join an activist group against apartheid while hiding in South Africa, and later, when he flees to Israel, he joins the kibbutz he’d dreamed of, and is embraced for his politics and architectural talents.
(Leo’s time in Israel also gives the audience a window into the kibbutzim of the 1960s, which were still practicing an almost militant form of socialism they have since left behind — children were raised communally and told to call their parents by their first names.)
Eventually, Valeria finds her husband and the children, after checking nearly every kibbutz in the country — we see Kfar Aza, one of the towns destroyed on Oct. 7, get crossed off a list — and Israeli courts order Leo and the children back to Mexico. An end note summarizes the rest of the history: Valeria and Carlos, her affair partner, won and raised the children together, who didn’t see Leo again for 20 years.
Of course, much of the show’s drama is in the obvious: Leo’s flight, the children’s growing realization that their father has been lying to them, Valeria’s desperation. But the quiet conflict between families, the power of reputation — both within the small Jewish community and between that community’s relationship and the broader world — undergird every moment of the story. The power of Jewish community is, ultimately, inescapable.
The post A shocking true story of Mexico’s Jewish community comes to Netflix appeared first on The Forward.