Israeli Cinema Professionals Talk Hopes & Fears Ahead Of Knife-Edge Election: “It’s Like A Horror Film Because I Don’t Know What Is Behind The Door”

“It’s like a horror film because I don’t know what is behind the door. It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen,” comments Israeli director Tom Shoval ahead of Israel’s knife-edge elections on Tuesday.

Like most of the country’s mainly liberal-minded film-making community, Shoval is hoping the poll will sweep incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power for good after 19 intermittent years in the top job across three periods: 1996 to 1999; 2009 to 2021, and 2022 until now.

Israel has lived through one of the most torrid periods in its 78-year history during Netanyahu’s third period in office, with the head of the Likud party coming to be viewed as one of the country’s most right-wing and bellicose prime ministers ever.

“It’s very tense because it’s so crucial. I mean, if it’s going to be again the government that is present now, or some form of it, then we’re looking at another four years full of the catastrophes that were that were a part of our life for the last four years, and maybe even worse,” says Shoval.

“It’s in every aspect of life, not just in art or culture. Everything is so fragile. There are so many elections where another party got a lot of mandates, but Likud still came through,” he adds.

Netanyahu’s latest term will forever be associated with the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks on Southern Israel, in which 1,200 people died and another 251 were taken hostages.

The government’s reluctance to negotiate to get the hostages back sparked fierce protests at home, as it opted instead for a punitive military campaign in Gaza that has killed at least 85,000 people and razed the Palestinian territory to the ground to wide international condemnation.

The period has also seen Netanyahu and his government attempt to dismantle the judiciary; oversee one of the biggest expansions of the settlement program into the West Bank in decades in a bid to bury a two-state solution for the Palestinians; and go to war with Iran alongside the U.S.

At the same time, Netanyahu has navigated a high-profile corruption case against him and his wife Sara, amid suggestions that he has embraced and even stoked local and regional tensions as a distraction tactic, as explored in Alexis Bloom’s documentary Bibi, a film never shown in Israel.

Against this backdrop, Israel’s film industry has found itself squeezed between censorship at home, as the government veered more and more to the right, and an international boycott as the world reacts to the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and unchecked settler attacks in the West Bank.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar has led the charge on the former moving to block funding for films critical of Israel and recently joining Netanyahu in an empty threat to strip directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of their Israeli citizenship for their bombshell documentary NAZA probing military operations in Gaza.

He also moved to defund the national Ophir Film Awards, the Best Film winner of which is automatically Israel’s Oscar submission, after The Sea, about a Palestinian boy living under occupation in the West Bank, won the top prize in 2025.

Shoval’s life in this period has been directly marked by his friend David Cunio being among those kidnapped and taken to Gaza on October 7, which in turn led to him making A Letter to David to raise awareness of his plight and that of the other hostages.

David and his brother were eventually released in October 2025, more than two years after their kidnapping, with Shoval updating the film to reflect his friend’s return home.

“It was very surprising for me that the film was never seen by officials in Israel, like nobody. At the time when David was still a hostage, even when we tried to set up that sort of screening, the government officials didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to see it. That’s the truth,” says Shoval, who has also spoken out against the killing in Gaza

“And a lot of times when I showed the film in Israel, Israelis would say to me, ‘Did Netanyahu and his government see this film? Do they understand who is there, who is a hostage?’ And I had to say no… I think a lot of people who will vote against him, will vote against him because of that, the fact that he let the hostages stay that long and didn’t do what he could to have an exchange sooner.”

Bring out the vote

Netanyahu’s biggest rival is former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, who is running under the banner of his fledgeling centrist party Yashar, which translates as “straight”, or “truthful”.

Neither Likud nor Yashar are expected to gain the 61 seats they need to claim a majority in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset parliament, so there are likely to be days if not weeks of political horse trading after the results start trickling in from early Wednesday morning onwards.

“I’m super anxious. Everyone is super anxious,” says a Europe-based cinema professional, who prefers to remain anonymous and is among some 67,000 Israeli citizens to have flown home to cast their vote.

His best-case scenario is that Eisenkot and his Yashar party secure enough votes to build a coalition, and that Yair Golan’s center-left, anti-occupation The Democrats party will be part of the mix.

“In the culture sphere, and the film industry, people are very oriented towards The Democrats,” he says, acknowledging some of its supporters may vote tactically for Eisenkot’s Yashar in the hope of giving him a big enough lead over Netanyahu to ensure he automatically gets the mandate to form a coalition.

Amid the nerves, he is quietly hopeful that the return of liberal-minded expats to vote as well as stronger center-left voter engagement generally will help swing the country away from its current right-wing trajectory.

His sentiments are echoed by industry veteran and former longtime Israel Film Fund head Katriel Schory, who was among 100,000 Israelis joining a demonstration in Tel Aviv over the weekend to protest against Netanyahu.

“We are very tense, of course, but we have generally a good feeling, especially after we saw almost 100,000 people out on the streets of Tel Aviv and more than 65,000 Israelis from all over the world taking the time and money to fly over, just to vote and go back, which is really unbelievable,” he says.

“I hardly know any other nation where such a thing could happen. But anyway, the airport is full of people flying in just for the vote.”

He reveals that aside from voting he and his family will be spending Tuesday working as registered inspectors to ensure that “Netanyahu and his gang will not fool around with the voting.”

A member of The Democrats, he hopes the party will gain around 10 to 12 seats and expects it to be part of a coalition government if Eisenkot comes out on top.

“90% of all the Israeli filmmakers, I guarantee you, vote for this party, including us,” he says.

His other hope is that the Arab parties – representing the 2.1 million Palestinian Israeli citizens who make up 21% of the electorate – will also be invited into a center-left coalition, although Eisenkot has not suggested this is an option as yet.

“Honestly, my biggest satisfaction for the moment is that we see after so many years that all the Israeli Palestinians are coming to vote, and they may end up with 16 members of parliament,” he says, suggesting the move is in reaction to the unchecked anti-Arab rhetoric of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and the realization they need to engage politically to get them out of power.

“I think that eventually Eisenkot will have no choice… he will have to find partners in order to get to 61, and then he may move towards the Arabs and say, ‘Okay I want you in the coalition with me because you are much better than the super ultra-orthodox and you are much better than Ben Gvir and Smotrich,” he continues.

Katriel acknowledges that Eisenkot does not perfectly align with his political beliefs but suggests his straight-talking manner and honesty will be a breath of fresh air after Netanyahu.

“It may signal to the world that there is something new and a different wave in this country,” he says.

Implications for the film industry

It is too early to say what it will mean for Israel’s cinema industry if Netanyahu is toppled in a favor of a center-left coalition.

Eisenkot has pledged to eliminate Hamas from Gaza within 18 months of his election, which signals more pain for the territory’s civilian population, while he is also among politicians condemning the depiction of the Israeli military in NAZA.

His candidate list, however, does feature Eliran Eliyahu, a filmmaker who chairs the Israeli Directors Guild and was one of the few politicians to speak up in support of NAZA directors Abraham and Szor. He has overseen the drafting of the party’s cultural policy plan.

“If the outcome is a democratic liberal government with a culture minister from The Democrats it could have a positive influence on the industry and the boycott, but the process will be very slow. It could take years,” says the Europe-based cinema professional.

He points to the uptick in settler violence in the West Bank, saying the boycott and international sentiment generally is unlikely to soften any time soon unless it is brought under control, alongside improvements for the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

“The West Bank, it’s insane, what’s going on right now. It’s incomprehensible. It’s reached such an extent of violence and terrorism. I call them Jewish terrorists, but they’re basically orchestrated by this government,” he says.

“Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are really working with them… they took advantage of the war in Gaza in order to escalate violence against Palestinians in the West Bank because the attention was diverted… It’s something Eisenkot has to deal with if he’s elected, but as I said before, I think the situation for the film industry is going to take a long time to improve.”

“I think one of the reasons it will take so long, in my opinion, is that many of the people who boycott, they don’t do it necessarily out of a very deep moral stance, but sometimes more from a very pragmatic approach of not getting involved in this, you know, shit show… they don’t want to be considered as someone who takes a standpoint in one direction or another. So I feel many people just prefer to be away from it.”

Schory is more optimistic on the domestic front suggesting there will be a shift away from nationalist and populist cultural policies, and the resulting self-censorship, but agrees it will take time for Israeli cinema to return to the international stage in the same capacity as before.

“On the Israeli side, maybe we will be a bit less squeezed in terms of budget. Although the budget was never actually cut. What happened was that the emphasis was put on populist films rather than art type films. On the international front, it will take time, ” he says.

Deadline also reached out to producers Yoav Roeh and Aurit Zamir at Gum Films who have been outspoken critics of Netanyahu’s attempt to dismantle the judiciary, while their production Two Kids A Day, exploring the detention of Palestinian children, was one of Zohar’s first targets.

They issued a joint statement in response expressing their despair at the current status quo in Israel, suggesting “it had been taken over by a gang of Jewish messianisms”.

“The current government has set out to destroy its country’s culture, alongside dismantling democracy and the independent judiciary. We have become filmmakers without a country. Not because we emigrated, but because it no longer exists. It destroyed itself in an unfathomable act of suicide,” it read.

“Is there a way back? That is the question we are grappling with ahead of tomorrow’s fateful day. If we do not defeat this autoimmune disease, we will die. Spiritually. But even if we defeat the other side, that is only where the story begins. Our failure as people of culture must become a glaring warning sign. Tomorrow’s results may keep us from going over the cliff, but we will still be walking along its edge.”

These sentiments are echoed by another Israeli professional, also preferring to remain anonymous, but with hope the country can turn a corner.

“These elections will determine Israel’s future and, within our own sphere, the future of the Israeli film community,” they said.

“This community has fought tirelessly to uphold democratic values and to keep open the possibility of meaningful artistic dialogue, both regionally and internationally. We’re keeping our fingers crossed, with fear and trembling, yet still optimistic that we can bring this terrible chapter to a close.”