Скачать или смотреть Ron Jacobsohn Attends the Israeli Academy Awards

Ron Jacobsohn, JN1 Correspondent:
The Ophir Awards, or the Israeli Academy Awards, is the official competition to what Israeli movie will go on to compete with around eighty films from around the world for the honor to be nominated in the foreign language category at the Oscars in Hollywood. Winning the competition has become a lot more thought after as in the past six years four winners of the Ophir Awards went on to be nominated for an Oscar, however none have yet to receive the highest honor to bring the Golden statue back to Israel. This year the five nominees for Best Movie at the Ophir awards are: Bethlehem, Hunting Elephants, Candies, Magic Men and Six Times

The president of the Israeli Film Academy, Eitan Even, is very proud to share with us the fact that movies coming out of Israel in the few years are gearing a lot of international attention.

Eitan Even, President of the Israel Film and TV Academy:
The Last Five, six, seven years just proven that Israel has great stuff to offer, good stories, good films and when you meet American distributors in the market in Berlin or in Cannes, actually they started to chase us. They're starting to look for the films, it's exactly opposite than what was before, that we had to chase them and beg them to take a film.

Israeli-Arab actor, Makram Huri, won the Best Actor award for portraying a Greek holocaust survivor in Magic Men.

Makram Huri, Winner, Best Actor:
I'm a human being and I'm an actor, though I'm an Arab, a Palestinian Arab but above all I'm a human being, I'm an actor, I must, I must you know, open up my hands to the whole mankind, otherwise I'm not an actor.

He has gotten all the way to the final of the Israeli version of The Voice but this time round he got to win as best supporting actor for his portrayal as Israeli Secret Service agent in Bethlehem.

Zahi HaLevy, Winner, Best Supporting Actor:
I was casted for this movie a couple of months before The Voice and the shooting of the movie was during the shooting of The Voice, so actually it was like parallel these things. I haven't transformed anything, I'm still a musician, an artist and I do what I love to do, I just discovered this world of cinema and I'm excited and thrilled and as long as the audience and people that hear my music or see me acting will appreciate it, then I will keep doing what I love to do.

First time director, Yuval Adler, not only won the Best Director award but also received the honor to take him movie, Bethlehem, to the Oscars.

Yuval Adler, Winner, Best Director:
The film was already screened in Telluride in United States and in Toronto, in a film festival so a lot of people saw it.
I, from what I gather, the response was very good. It's a film that's very detailed and shows the reality of what's going on here in a completely different way and I hope they're going to like it. I think people who see the film, they feel that they understand better something about the complexity of the situation on the ground, because we show the film,we show the things from kind of a street level, we don't show the big politics. People told me it has an effect on them, that they kind of suddenly understand more and relate to the other side more and I hope that's the case.

We wanted to get an experts opinion from the president of the academy about Bethlehem’s chance to make it in Hollywood.

Eitan Even, President of the Israel Film and TV Academy On one hand, it's a great film, on the other hand – a lot of films regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were done in the last 10 years and I'm not sure if the world has the patience to see them, but a good film is a good film and you never know.

Ron Jacobsohn, JN1 Correspondent:
So Bethlehem the story of an Israeli secret service agent and a Palestinian collaborator won 6 Ophir Awards including Best Movies, which makes it the official Israeli entry for the Oscars.
For JN1 I am Ron Jacobsohn at the Israeli Academy Awards Ceremony in Haifa