The past few years have not been an easy time for the Israeli film industry, which has seen its filmmakers boycotted abroad and threatened in various ways by the local government. Despite this, however, one group has thrived: female directors.
No male has won the Ophir Award, Israel’s Oscar equivalent, for Best Director since 2021. In 2024, four women were nominated in this category, and in 2025 three women were nominated. This comes at a time when, in Hollywood, male directors lead the industry. This January when the Oscar nominations were announced and only one woman, Chloe Zhao, who co-wrote and directed the British film Hamnet, was nominated for Best Director, Natalie Portman was one of many who commented, saying: “We have a lot of work to do still.”
More than prizes
The Israeli film industry has already done the work, it seems. But the number of female Ophir winners and nominees tell only part of the story. What’s far more important – and speaks to a lasting industry-wide shift – is that most Israeli movies by female directors have been excellent.
They tell complex female-oriented stories, some of which might never have been told if these women hadn’t emerged in the film industry. These directors have made films about women who are poor and rich, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, religious and secular, Jewish and Arab, immigrants and Sabras. They have explored issues such as fertility problems, divorce, child-rearing, subservient roles in the military, and much more.
The subjects of recent Israeli movies made by women are as diverse as the directors themselves. Tom Nesher’s Come Closer (2024) is a movie about a young woman coping with the sudden death of her younger brother, and bonds with the girlfriend he kept secret. It won Nesher the Best Director Ophir and the Ophir Award for Best Picture. It’s the only movie by an Israeli director since the current war broke out to be released commercially in the US.
Nesher said, “I feel genuinely proud and empowered by the representation of female directors in recent years in Israeli cinema and television. There has been real, visible progress…When I look at Hollywood, the contrast is striking. In 96 years of the Academy Awards, only nine women have been nominated for Best Director, and only three have ever won. That puts into perspective how significant the shift in Israel really is, and how much further the global industry still has to go.”
Women in focus
Eti Tsicko won the 2025 Ophir Best Director award for Nandauri, which tells the story of a Georgian-born female Israeli lawyer who returns to the rural area she came from to help bring a child separated from his mother to Israel.
Netalie Braun’s Oxygen, which won the Haggiag Award for Best Israeli Feature Film at the 2025 Jerusalem Film Festival, is about a mother driven to desperate measures when her son, a combat soldier, is about to be sent off to war. It captures a maternal dilemma thousands face but has rarely been portrayed on screen.
Maya Kenig’s 2024 film The Milky Way, a dystopian black comedy, is about a single mother pumping her breast milk in a creepy factory to be purchased by wealthier women. It won the Ophir for Best Screenplay.
The Best Picture winner in 2023, Seven Blessings, which portrays the emotional struggles between two generations of Moroccan women in Israel, won Ophir Awards for its director, Ayelet Menahemi, and for its co-screenwriters, actresses Reymonde Amsallem and Eleanor Sela, who drew on their experiences to write the script. Menahemi and Sela are currently collaborating on a movie about a female tank crew during the October 7 attack.
Maya Dreifuss’s Highway 65 (2024) is a neo-noir crime and psychological thriller about an awkward female detective doggedly investigating the killing of a woman that only she seems to care about.
Lee Gilat’s Girls Like Us (2025) tells the story of a vulnerable teenage girl whose parents are mentally ill, who bonds with a female soldier at a daycare program.
In Sophie Artus’s Halisa (2024), a nurse undergoing fertility treatments takes in a stressed single mother in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood.
Esty Shushan’s Book of Ruth, which was just released, tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox family coping with a tragedy. Shushan is a women’s rights activist in the haredi community.
Going back a couple of years, Aalam Warqe Davidian’s Fig Tree (2019) drew on the director’s own background to tell the story of a young woman during the civil war in Ethiopia in the 1990s, a movie that won awards around the world.
Early exceptions
There were several notable female Israeli directors throughout the history of the film industry, such as Michal Bat Adam, an actress-turned-director working mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when Israeli movies were at a low ebb.
In the current era of a more robust film industry, which kicked off in the early 2000s following the passage of the Cinema Law in 2001, female directors were not a major presence. There were two exceptions.
One was Keren Yedaya, who made the 2004 film Or, about a prostitute and her teenage daughter, which won the Camera d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The second was Shira Gefen. Her film Jellyfish, which she wrote and co-directed with Etgar Keret, tells stories about a group of Tel Aviv residents. It also won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2007.
But the path that today’s filmmakers are following was paved by four distinctive and talented directors around a decade ago, each of whom focused on a specific demographic.
One was Ronit Elkabetz, who died in 2016 at age 51. Collaborating with her brother Shlomi Elkabetz, she wrote, directed, and starred in a trilogy based on the story of her Moroccan family: To Take a Wife (2004), Shiva (2008), and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014).
In the first scene of To Take a Wife, the heroine tells her male relatives she wants a divorce and is bullied into dropping the idea. In the last scene of Gett, she manages to convince her husband to let her go. It is a quintessential Israeli Mizrahi saga and highlights the problem of how Israel’s religious divorce laws discriminate against women.
Rama Burshtein grew up secular and became ultra-Orthodox as a young adult. In 2012, she made the film Fill the Void, about a young haredi woman who loses her sister. This film won its star, Hadas Yaron, the Best Actress award at the Venice International Film Festival. Burshtein went on to make another movie and a television series set in the haredi community, The Wedding Plan and Fire Dance.
Maysaloun Hamoud, an Arab Israeli who identifies as Palestinian, made waves in Israel and around the world with her debut film, In Between (2016). It tells the story of three Arab women sharing an apartment in Tel Aviv, and deals with ethnic discrimination, religious oppression, and sexual identity. It resulted in a fatwa against her from an Islamic authority, as well as death threats, and it was banned in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm by the mayor. She has since made the crime television drama Nafas.
Perhaps the female filmmaker who has had the single biggest influence on today’s industry is Talya Lavie, whose 2014 black comedy Zero Motivation tells a story of demoralized female soldiers in a Negev base, tired of filing and serving coffee, which many Israeli women could relate to.
But it was able to connect with international audiences as well, winning the Narrative Feature competition at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It’s fitting that Lavie is currently at work on a fact-based drama about the female border observers whose warnings were ignored by the higher-ups and who paid with their lives on October 7.
After these films by Elkabetz, Burshtein, Hamoud, and Lavie hit it big, more female filmmakers began putting their stories at center stage. This has brought us to the current landscape, where it can reasonably be said that women dominate the industry.
Built to last
To try to get a handle on how Israel has succeeded so dramatically in a feat that has eluded much larger and better financed film industries, I turned to Dana Blankstein Cohen, the CEO and executive director of the Sam Spiegel Film School since 2019, and a filmmaker herself. Lavie and Burshtein both studied at the school, which has made The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the 15 best global film schools for seven consecutive years. She said that the film school has always had a student body that was close to 50-50, and now stands at about 52% female students.
“What’s important to me is not only the percentage but the fact that women are present across all disciplines – directing, cinematography, editing, sound, and producing – and that their voices are central to the school’s creative culture,” she said.
“I think what we are seeing now is the outcome of a long, cumulative process. For years, women filmmakers were developing strong artistic languages, building professional resilience, and telling stories that expanded what Israeli cinema could look like.”
She is convinced that there is no going back and that women will continue to play a major part in the film industry. “I absolutely believe this will continue. What gives me confidence is that gender equality today is embedded not only in individual success stories but in the structures of education and leadership. At Sam Spiegel, a majority of the school’s leadership is female, and this shapes decision-making, pedagogical priorities, and institutional values. When equality becomes structural rather than exceptional, it sustains itself across generations.”
However, she is worried about complacency. “I would be cautious about saying the issue is ‘solved.’ Gender equality always requires awareness and care. But I do think the Israeli film industry has benefited from a few unique conditions: a relatively small and interconnected professional field; strong public film funds with clear cultural mandates; and film schools that prioritize artistic excellence over hierarchy.
“This combination allows talent to be recognized earlier and more directly, regardless of gender. Israeli filmmakers, particularly women, have been very active internationally, learning from and contributing to global conversations. Our participation in initiatives such as the international female leadership program we are launching together with Ifs Koln during the Berlinale Film Festival is part of that exchange: sharing experience, building networks, and strengthening leadership capacities across borders.”
It isn’t only the person in the director’s chair that is important, she said, but a change across every facet of the industry that has made the difference. It’s important for her “to acknowledge the many women in decision-making positions across the industry – in film funds, festivals, broadcasters, and cultural institutions – who are doing extraordinary work with professionalism, vision, and integrity. Their impact is profound, even when it is not always visible on screen.”
Filmmaker Netalie Braun agreed with Cohen, saying, “As someone who has worked mainly in the field of documentary cinema, I didn’t personally feel discrimination because it’s a more equal space in terms of opportunities for women. But in narrative filmmaking, the numbers speak for themselves, and gradual change has been taking place in recent years – mostly thanks to heightened awareness about the issue that began in Israel in the early 2000s with the founding and activity of the NGO Nashim B’tmuna [“women in the picture”], and I’m among them. The organization initiated and ran the Women’s Film Festival in Rehovot for a decade, and afterwards the Women Filmmakers Forum. In recent years, the organization Big Sister [co-founded by Cohen] has also joined in, contributing to solidarity between experienced creators and those just starting out. These changes are critical to correcting a cultural injustice that has existed for many years in cinema as in other fields.”
Cohen said she was looking forward to the day “when articles about gender gaps will no longer be necessary, when equality is no longer a headline but simply a given. Until then, our role as educators and leaders is to continue creating environments where talent, responsibility, and creative freedom are accessible to all.”
But looking at the many recent and many Israeli movies and submissions to films funded by women, that day is closer now than ever. ■