Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar has said he will pull state funding for the country’s national film honors, the Ophir Awards, after the Palestinian anti-war drama The Sea took top prize at the 2025 ceremony Tuesday night.
Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s drama follows a 12-year-old Palestinian boy living under occupation in the West Bank who risks his life, dodging military checkpoints and the police, to go to the beach for the first time in Tel Aviv. Under the system set up by the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, the Ophir best film winner is also automatically Israel’s submission for the Oscars in the best international feature category.
In a statement from the Israeli Culture Ministry on Wednesday, Zohar said the win for The Sea was “disgraceful,” given the film’s negative portrayal of Israeli soldiers.
“There is no greater slap in the face of Israeli citizens than the embarrassing and detached annual Ophir Awards ceremony,” the statement read as reported by Israeli media. Starting next year, Zohar said, the “pathetic ceremony” will “no longer be funded by taxpayers’ money. Under my watch, Israeli citizens will not pay from their pockets for a ceremony that spits in the faces of our heroic soldiers.”
Zohar has had the Ophir Awards in his sights since this year’s nominations were announced. In addition to The Sea, best film contenders included Nadav Lapid’s Yes — a biting satire attacking the moral complicity of Israeli society with the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza — and Natali Braun’s Oxygen about a mother fighting to pull her son out of military service. In response, Zohar threatened to cut funding for the awards, saying they were promoting Palestinian narratives over national interests. Yes won best soundtrack and best editing honors on Tuesday night. Oxygen was snubbed.
This year’s Ophir Awards, held just hours after a UN independent commission issued a report finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, was a somber affair, with many attendees wearing black and winners referencing the war, highlighting both the fate of Israeli hostages abducted during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 terror attacks and the devastation wrought by Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip.
Thirteen-year-old Muhammad Gazawi, who won best actor for his starring role in The Sea, used his acceptance speech to call for all children everywhere “to live and dream without wars.” His co-star Khalifa Natour, who won best supporting actor, did not attend the ceremony. But a statement read on his behalf condemned the ongoing war: “Following the army’s entry into Gaza and the genocide that frightens me greatly, I cannot find words to describe the magnitude of the horror, and everything else becomes secondary to me. Even cinema and theater.”
Israel’s traditionally left-wing film industry has come under fire from all fronts. A group of more than 1,300 filmmakers, including such bold-faced names as Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, and Tilda Swinton, has backed a pledge from activist group Film Workers for Palestine supporting a boycott of Israeli film institutions and companies that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Veteran director Uri Barbash (Beyond the Walls, Nitza’s Choice), who received a lifetime achievement award at the Ophirs Tuesday night, delivered an impassioned speech condemning the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and culture minister Zohar as well as the Hollywood boycott. He instead called for solidarity
“We have chosen, we will strike and protest, and we will create, all of us together, Jews and Arabs, religious and secular,” he said. “All of us together will eradicate the evil from our beloved land. The sanctity of life, the preservation of life, and human dignity must have no ethnic or geographical boundaries. It is our sacred duty to bring all the hostages back to their families. Immediately. To end the accursed war and replace the ‘divide and rule’ regime that has declared war on Israeli society!”
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