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History of the industry
[INTRO]

The history of Israeli cinema is so closely related to the history of the state of Israel itself since some of the wars and international conflicts that the country has started or been involved in inspired Israeli film directors and gave rise to the different periods of the nation's film industry.

[1920s-1950s]

Some authors consider 1948 as the year in which the Israeli film industry was born along with the establishment of the state of Israel, others hold that its trajectory dates back to the 1920s when the silent films of Ya'akov Ben-Dov and other Israeli film directors made their appearance, but what they all agree on is that Zionist Realism Cinema dominated the industry until the 1950s. The films of this cinematic current were part of the propagandistic material used by Zionist organizations during the pre-statehood period to encourage the migration of European Jews to Palestine, they emphasized the agricultural way of living in the land of Palestine and featured traditional symbols that Jews could relate to, such as the Star of David and the Menorah. Between the end of World War II and the declaration of the Jewish state, Israeli films portrayed holocaust survivors and their journey to escape their tragic past of persecution, homelessness, and desolation in order to become true Israelis and fulfill their "duty" to claim the land, build settlements, and begin a new life in Palestine. Post-1948 films shifted from the Holocaust theme and started to highlight the new Israeli 'heroes', mainly the soldiers and the 'Sabras' (newborn Israelis). After the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict, these films were one way in which the new state forged a nationalist narrative and portrayed how the perfect Hebrew Israeli men should be This branch of the Zionist Realism genre is called the Heroic-Nationalist Cinema.

In the 1960s-70s, two new film genres were born. The first one, the Bourekas films, named after a popular local pastry, were comedies and melodramas that depicted the inter-ethnic conflict between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, which generally was resolved by means of the consummation of a mixed marriage. The ingenuity of Bourekas filmmakers was, on one hand, their ability to use comedy and sentimentalism as a way to avoid serious involvement with more problematic issues and, on the other, their effort to legitimize Mizrahim as part of the Jewish-Israeli society through the marriage plot. The most famous of these films was Ephraim Kishon's Sallah Shabati (1964), which was the first Israeli film nominated for an Oscar award and a turning point in the Israeli film industry's history due to its combination of elements from the new and modern Israeli cinema. The second genre to appear during these decades was the New Sensibility cinema, also labeled as personal cinema or the Israeli New Wave. This current was characterized by low production budget films with urban scenery, debutant actors or non-actors as protagonists, experimental cinematic techniques, open-ended plots, and unconventional narrative strategies. However, the most important thing connecting these films was a strong motivation to break with the political subordination of films to Zionist ideology and a sense of fight for the recognition of film maker's artistic autonomy.

The aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the electoral victory of Menachen Begin in 1977, and the rise of the Likud party in the country's political arena created the perfect environment for the birth of a new cinematic trend: films of the Political Cinema or Protest Cinema of the 1980s was the way in which Israeli filmmakers showed their opposition to the new right-wing government and protested against the political and social reality in Israel. The themes handled in these films were varied; they portrayed the complexity of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and native Israeli Jews; they criticized Israeli militarism, and they exposed the colonialist side of the Zionist mission in Palestine. Another important aspect of this new cinematic wave was that it questioned the Israeli identity and it did so by altering the traditional characteristics of the protagonists; for instance, the former 'Sabra hero' of the Zionist Realism cinema was now presented as a physically impotent, mentally damaged, weak, or frustrated soldier.