Monday, 2nd March: Foxtrot (15)

Half Season Membership: £32.50 / Guest Tickets – £7.50 (available at the door)

Israel/Switzerland/Germany/France  –  Drama  –  Year: 2017  –  Running time: 113 mins
Languages: Hebrew, German

Audience response:

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.06 from 18 responses)

  • Excellent’: 5 votes
  • ‘Very Good’: 10 votes
  • ‘Good’: 2 votes
  • ‘Satisfactory’: 1 vote
  • ‘Poor’: 0 votes

Read the comments here or visit our “Foxtrot” discussion page

Synopsis:

There are elements of surrealism and slap-stick comedy in Maoz’s controversial follow-up to Lebanon. From the moment Israeli soldiers knock on the Feldman’s door, bearing what can only be bad news, every single sequence is thrillingly unexpected. Derided as an “anti-Israel narrative” by the minister of culture Miri Regev (she hadn’t seen the film!), it was still Israel’s official Oscar entry for 2018

Surreal, mysterious, and emotionally gripping, Foxtrot is a masterful piece of cinema.

M.Faust in The Daily Public (Buffalo)

Director: Samuel Maoz
Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013) / Lebanon (2009) / Total Eclipse (2000)


… Michael Feldman
… Daphna Feldman
… Jonathan
… Alma
… Maria

(for full cast and more information, see “Foxtrot” in IMDB)

CFC Film Notes

Samuel Maoz’s alternately acclaimed and reviled Israeli drama … is thick with grief, confusion and metaphor, the last of which extends to the title.

David Edelstein in Vulture

Brilliantly constructed with a visual audacity that serves the subject rather than the other way around, this is award-winning filmmaking on a fearless level.

Jay Weissberg in Variety

It’s a riveting portrait of a secular Job.

Joe Morgenstern in Wall Street Journal

Foxtrot makes demands on audiences and then richly rewards them. It’s a riveting, deeply resonant achievement.

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone

Could the conclusion of this structurally fascinating film be a bit of a let-down, as accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned for the final reveal? It’s presented in three parts. First, we see the fraught existence of a successful middle-aged architect and his wife in Tel Aviv whose son is away doing military service. Then the fraught existence of this son’s unit, out in the middle of nowhere, guarding a border post. Then back with the architect and his family. The first and third scenes are very theatrical, like a conventional stage play, and the second – the centre-piece, perhaps – is visually weirder, at times almost hallucinatory.

Lior Ashkenazi plays Michael Feldman, well-respected architect and bearded paterfamilias: a handsome figure of a man. The difficulties in his relationship with his wife Dephna (Sarah Adler) are exposed by a traumatic official visit. Moving to a radically different scene involving the son (Yonathan Shiray is Jonathan Feldman) in the Israel Defense Force, the fate of both father and son speaks volumes about official secrecy and a tendency on the part of the authorities to cover things up, never to admit a fault.

With absurdist, cartoon-like flashes of surrealism and even a brief animated sequence at the end, this witty film, designed like a graphic novel, won the Grand jury prize at the Venice film festival in 2017.

Selected UK reviews:

One Room With a View (Jack Blackwell)
The Arts Desk (Graham Fuller)
Sight and Sound (Paul O’Callaghan)

Audience Feedback for Foxtrot

Audience Feedback for Foxtrot

There were 18 reaction slips returned following the screening of this film.  The results were: ‘Excellent’: 5 votes ‘Very Good’: 10 votes ‘Good’: 2 votes ‘Satisfactory’: 1 votes ‘Poor’: 0 votes To read all the comments, click on the following … Continue reading

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