Over the past decade, Israeli cinema and television have gained a considerable foothold within the international market. From being relative unknowns, Israeli films now headline major festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, Locarno, and Tribeca; and since 2007, they have also made an impressive showing at the Academy Awards, with four nominations in the Best Foreign Language Film category, and two for Best Documentary Feature. Israeli television shows have garnered even greater global prominence as of late, through their streaming on platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, as well as their adaptation into non-Israeli televisual production contexts. While this success is grounded in contemporary enhancements within the craft and aesthetic sensibilities of Israeli audiovisual creation, it also highlights the latter’s increased transnational address.
As Israel’s film and television has traditionally been read along national terms, this transnational emphasis may appear to be a recent development. Yet these areas of creative production have always been transnational, and consequently have long implicated “Israeliness” in discursive relationships that go well beyond Israel’s geopolitical borders. Exposing these relationships is the objective of this roundtable—as well as of the forthcoming anthology that inspired it, "Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema" (ed. Rachel S. Harris and Dan Chyutin, Indiana University Press, 2021). Picking up and expanding upon this volume’s scholarly project, we aim to engage both past and present of Israeli film/TV, and through con/textual analysis, challenge claims for them being exclusively—or even primarily—the product of internal, national concerns. As a result, we will come to terms with what exactly constitutes as “Israeli” in Israeli cinema and television, and to what extent a re-definition of Israeli films and TV shows as global texts may also situate them as exemplars of globalizing trends within the world’s audiovisual industry.