Event Summary
The Ministry of Culture and Sports announced a film competition for Israeli filmmakers (October 5, 2025) following the Minister, Miki Zohar’s, intention to cancel government funding to the long-running Ophir Awards, granted by the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, which selects the Israeli representative for the Oscar Awards in the Best International Feature Film category. Zohar’s initiative to withdraw funding from the Ophir Awards came after the win of the film The Sea, which, according to him, portrays IDF soldiers in a false and defamatory manner.
The Sea, directed by Shai Carmeli Pollak, tells the story of Khaled, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from a village near the city of Ramallah, who tries to reach the sea for the first time in his life during a school trip but is sent back home at a military checkpoint due to an expired entry permit while his classmates continue on the trip.
In March 2025, Minister Zohar called on cultural institutions to boycott the Israeli-Palestinian documentary No Other Land, which won the 2025 Oscar Award for Best Documentary Feature. Following this, the ministry’s legal adviser issued a clarification stating that the minister has no authority to intervene in cultural content or to revoke public funding based on the views expressed in artistic works.
The Israeli Academy of Film and Television, whose standing the new award seeks to undermine, is a CSO that has been promoting Israeli film and television production domestically and internationally for over 35 years. Among other things, the Academy is responsible for the Ophir Awards, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars. This is not the first time that the Minister of Culture and Sports has acted—or called for action—to deny financial support to CSOs that provide a platform for works or opinions he perceives as contrary to government policy.