Moshé Mizrahi

Mizrahi was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1931.[4] He moved with his mother and brother to British Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1940s, with accounts placing him at fourteen or fifteen.[1][4] His family settled in Tel Aviv’s Shabazi neighborhood, and his background combined a Jerusalemite maternal family with Turkish, Greek, and Italian ancestry on his father’s side.[4] His brother Shabtai was killed in an Egyptian air strike during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.[1]

As a young man, Mizrahi attended the youth group at Kibbutz Ma’abarot and joined the founding group of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak in the late 1940s.[1][4] His language skills subsequently led him into immigration work.[4] He also served as secretary of the Jerusalem branch of the left-wing party founded by Moshe Sneh; Khrushchev’s speech at a party congress later prompted a break that distanced him from the communist left.[4]

His ambition to make films took him to Paris in the late 1950s. He spent eight years there before directing the television series Laure in 1967, and his career thereafter remained divided between Israel and France.[4] When honored by Tel Aviv University many years later, he recalled that he had left school at fourteen and never returned to formal schooling.[5]

Mizrahi’s first feature, A Guest in the Dead Season, was an Israeli-French co-production based on a short story by his first wife, Rachel Mizrahi, also known as Rachel Fabian.[1] Sources date it to 1969 or 1970; it received nominations for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.[1][4] His subsequent career encompassed fourteen feature films as well as television series and theatrical productions, with work divided between Israel and France.[4]

Mizrahi wrote and directed I Love You Rosa (1972), a story set in Jerusalem at the end of the nineteenth century.[6][7] Its central character is a young Jewish widow who, under the religious custom presented in the film, is expected to marry her late husband’s eleven-year-old brother.[6][7] The story develops the relationship between the widow and her young brother-in-law.[1] Michal Bat-Adam made her screen debut in the film, beginning a collaboration with Mizrahi that continued across numerous productions and into their marriage.[8]

I Love You Rosa entered the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.[8] It was well received by Cannes audiences and some international critics; contemporary praise called it “A milestone” and observed, “The story seems local, but it is universal.”[7] Photographer Laron also worked with Mizrahi on the set, as part of his film-camera work with prominent Israeli filmmakers.[9]

For The House on Chelouche Street (1973), Mizrahi drew on his own life and heritage to portray a Sephardic Egyptian immigrant family in a working-class Tel Aviv neighborhood in 1947.[10] The central boy arrives from Egypt with his mother and struggles between her possessive love and his wish for independence.[1] Against the upheavals preceding Israel’s establishment, the film connects domestic and intra-communal tensions with historical events and preserves a depiction of a bygone era of Sephardic culture.[10]

The House on Chelouche Street also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.[3] Together with I Love You Rosa, it followed Ephraim Kishon’s The Policeman (1971) in a sequence of three consecutive years of Israeli films nominated in the category.[3] Mizrahi made I Love You Rosa, The House on Chelouche Street, and Daughters, Daughters within approximately a year and a half; the three films formed a trilogy giving prominence to Sephardi Jewish life.[4]

Daughters, Daughters, also known as Abu el-Banat, centers on a wealthy and respected Jerusalem father, played by Shaike Ophir, who longs for a son despite having a large family of daughters.[7] He consults magicians to remove what he regards as a curse.[7] The French Cannes committee selected the film from the Israeli submissions in 1974, and it competed for the Palme d’Or.[1][7] Mizrahi recalled loud applause at its Cannes screening, where festival viewers gave it the audience award.[7] Its Israeli theatrical run had been interrupted after it opened shortly before the Yom Kippur War; when it returned to screens in August 1974, he said it could not repeat its earlier success.[7]

Mizrahi’s Madame Rosa (1977), made in France, adapted Romain Gary’s The Life Before Us, published under the pseudonym Émile Ajar.[1] Mizrahi both wrote and directed the film, whose cast included Simone Signoret, Claude Dauphin, Samy Ben Youb, and Bat-Adam.[11] Signoret plays an aging Jewish madam and Auschwitz survivor who cares for prostitutes’ children.[11][12] Her relationship with an abandoned Arab boy revives her spirit, while memories of the roundup that transformed her life continue to haunt her.[11][12]

Signoret insisted on wearing a tattoo for the role, even though it was never visible in the finished film.[12] The makeup artist, Maud Begon, had herself been imprisoned at Ravensbrück; Signoret said the number indicated deportation in 1942.[12] The film’s treatment of a Jewish caretaker and an Arab child also places it among works examining Jewish-Muslim relations through shared cultural roots, inter-confessional friendships, and politically charged differences.[13]

Madame Rosa won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for France, with the award given to the film rather than to Mizrahi personally.[1][11] It prevailed over entries by Luis Buñuel and Ettore Scola, as well as Menachem Golan’s Operation Thunderbolt.[1] The success followed Mizrahi’s two nominations for Israeli films and became a central international achievement of his career.[1]

His subsequent work included I Sent a Letter to My Love (1980) and La Vie Continue (1982).[4][14] He wrote and directed the latter, which follows a middle-aged woman, widowed after twenty years of marriage, as she attempts to build a new life with her children.[14] In Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986), Tom Hanks plays an American pilot serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II who falls in love with a local Sephardi woman in Jerusalem.[15] Mizrahi later directed The Nail-Eaters (1988) and returned to Israeli filmmaking with Women in 1996.[4]

Mizrahi and Bat-Adam’s professional partnership extended beyond her performances in his films.[8][16] They met during the making of I Love You Rosa, and he subsequently served as producer on her first film as a director.[16] In a joint interview in 2003, Bat-Adam explained that he encouraged her independence by staying away from that film’s set, calling his absence “the most beautiful gift he could have given me.”[16] Mizrahi, comparing her with actors and major stars he had directed internationally, called her “a rare actress in her ability and sensitivity.”[16]

Their later collaboration Life Is Not Life involved several members of the family: Bat-Adam wrote and directed it, Mizrahi acted and co-produced, and their son Daniel composed the music.[16] Mizrahi also taught at Tel Aviv University, extending his work in cinema into the training of younger filmmakers.[5]

Mizrahi received a lifetime achievement prize from the Israeli Academy of Film and Television in 2001.[17] In 2004, Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Arts awarded him its first “Honorary Fellow of the Faculty” title in recognition of his professional achievements.[5] At the ceremony, he spoke of being moved to teach at the university despite having left school at fourteen.[5]

His early Israeli films gave complex dramatic treatment to Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish characters, bringing voices less familiar in the canonical Israeli cinema of the period to the screen.[4] His work with French partners also made him a pioneer of Israeli international co-productions.[5] The House on Chelouche Street belongs to an earlier group of films about Middle Eastern and North African Jews in Israel that marked important developments in their cinematic representation.[18]

Love, particularly forbidden or seemingly impossible love, recurs throughout Mizrahi’s films, alongside sustained attention to female characters in both writing and performance.[4] Among the performers he directed were Signoret, Bat-Adam, Hanks, Gila Almagor, Avner Hizkiyahu, Yosef Shiloach, and Shaike Ophir.[4] He gave major dramatic roles to Almagor, Shiloach, and Ophir.[5] Almagor, who appeared in several of his films, said he “brought a European touch to Israeli cinema,” while retired film studies professor Regine Mihal Friedman singled out the place he gave women in his work.[19]

Mizrahi died in Tel Aviv on August 3, 2018, aged eighty-six, after hospitalization with pneumonia and multiple-organ failure.[2] His funeral was held in Tel Aviv.[19] He was survived by Bat-Adam and two children.[2]

Later retrospective assessments argued that some Israeli institutions and media in the 1970s categorized Mizrahi too narrowly as an ethnic filmmaker, despite the range of his Israeli and universal themes and the dramatic complexity that distinguished his work from the “bourekas film” category.[4] Another assessment placed The House on Chelouche Street among important milestones in the representation of Middle Eastern and North African Jews while arguing that such films did not receive enough public attention or contemporary critical understanding.[18]

Mizrahi himself felt that winning an Oscar with a French production had complicated his standing in Israel.[1] He said the award had done him “no good in Israel” because a victory with a non-Israeli film made him “‘not one of us,’” while acknowledging that it had helped his career abroad, even if that benefit faded over time.[1]