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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)

(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)