Matzor

Matzor
Original film poster
מצור
Directed byGilberto Tofano
Written byDahn Ben Amotz
Gilberto Tofano
Produced byYa'ackov Agmon
Michael J. Kagan
StarringEran Agmon
CinematographyDavid Gurfinkel
Edited byDanny Shick
Release date
  • 1969 (1969)
Running time
100 minutes
CountryIsrael
LanguageHebrew

Matzor (Hebrew: מצור, translit. Siege) is a 1969 Israeli film directed and co-written by Italian director Gilberto Tofano. It involves the theme of a widowed mother (actress Gila Almagor), her lover (actor Dahn Ben Amotz) and her ex-husband's friend (actor Yehoram Gaon). It was entered into the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also selected as the Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.

Cast

Reception

In 1975, Emanuel Bar-Kedma, film critic at Yedioth Ahronoth, described the film as "the social, psychological study of a war widow within such a study of the general country's mood throughout the War of Attrition.

Themes

Fiammetta Martegani, an Italian-Israeli anthropologist has identified the film as belonging to the "heroic-nationalist" genre. However, it is the first in the genre to have a female protagonist rather than a heroic male and to focus its attention on themes such as family and intimacy.

According to Maretgani, the film position Israel as first and foremost a Western country and one that shares the ideals of Western individualism. Likewise, Nitzan Ben Shaul, a director and academic has argued that the film "progressively, formally and thematically shifts its initial concept of war as siege and the collective social paradigm as is necessary, to a conception of war as part of an international struggle between east and west. This is correlated with an emerging individualistic western oriented paradidm."

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: Matzor". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-04-07.
  2. ↑ Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Martegani, Fiammetta (2017). The Israeli Defence Forces' Representation in Israeli Cinema: Did David Betray His Soldiers?. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 80–81. ISBN 9781443866965. Retrieved 5 April 2026.