His latest film, the upbeat and optimistic Cupcakes (‘ Bananot’), is currently in Israeli theatres just 11 months after his previous film, the devastatingly sad Yossi(a follow-up to his 2000 film Yossi & Jagger), screened at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. After a six year hiatus, following the domestically ill-received The Bubble, Fox bounced back this year. With his keen eye for blending pop and politics, Fox has been one of the most successful Israeli directors with international audiences. But this time we’re talking about Eytan Fox. We’ve discussed the work of Cedar in Fathom 1, Moreh in Fathom 2 and I hope to write about Folman for Fathom 4, (if my bet is correct, The Congress, Folman’s follow up to Waltz With Bashir, will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May). That makes it, albeit somewhat belatedly, the most successful film class in Israeli cinema history.
Now, here is the crazy part: three of those five filmmakers – Folman, Moreh and Fox – are graduates of the same class from the Tel Aviv University Film school (my Alma Mater as well), where they started their studies together in 1986. The five successful filmmakers who did are: Joseph Cedar with Footnote, Ari Folman with Waltz With Bashir, Eran Kolirin with The Band’s Visit, Eytan Fox with Walk on Water and most recently, Dror Moreh with The Gatekeepers (crossing the two million dollar threshold is even harder for a documentary). Rare are the foreign films that reach it, and before 2004 no Israeli film had ever passed that benchmark. Now, two million dollars for a small foreign language art film is a lot of money.
In the past nine years, five Israeli movies grossed more than two million dollars in the US. Israeli cinema has been more mainstream and gay than subversive and queer.