Programmer's Note

This witty and arresting fourth feature from Israeli writer/director Joseph Cedar — whose Beaufort received a much-deserved Academy Award® nomination for best foreign language film — boasts a rare combination. It is at once intellectually stimulating, formally daring, emotionally devastating and dryly humorous.

Footnote’s premise is grounded in a potent archetypal conflict, set in a specific, fascinating milieu. The ornery Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba, beloved comedic star of Israeli stage and television) and his ambitious, academically bearded son Uriel (Late Marriage’s Lior Ashkenazi) are rival professors in the Talmudic Studies department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The film begins with a ceremony in which Uriel is officially installed in the Academy — an accolade the deeply envious Eliezer, much to his chagrin, has never received.

The balance shifts when Eliezer learns that, following decades of frustrated anticipation, he is finally going to be awarded the prestigious Israel Prize. What unfolds is a game of generational one-upmanship driven by desire, pettiness and pride, involving not only Eliezer and Uriel but numerous academics whose careers are equally bogged down in the wildly competitive realm of Talmudic scholarship.

Cedar’s detailed approach possesses a playful literary quality. He incorporates novelistic devices throughout the film, such as chapter headings that describe the characters’ psychological undercurrents. (It’s not at all surprising that Footnote won the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.) The story’s intriguing, morally complicated dynamics allow us to understand the ways in which father and son differ from and resemble each other. Yet for all its subtlety, Footnote also features scenes of great intensity, driven by Amit Poznansky’s unforgettable score, which imbues this relatively small-scale drama with an epic quality.

With this singular new work, Cedar proves he’s earned far more than a mere footnote in any discerning survey of twenty-first century cinema.