The moment that set off the current crisis in Israeli cinema was, on its face, unexceptional. At the Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars, the prize for Best Film went to “The Sea,” a restrained, closely observed film about a Palestinian boy from the West Bank who sneaks into Israel to see the Mediterranean for the first time. The film offers no slogans and proposes no solutions. It lingers instead on longing, geography and the ordinary violence of exclusion.
