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Description of event
| 6:30pm |
Arrival |
| 7pm – 7:30pm |
Meeting and discussion with screenplay writer, Ron Leshem, getting to know him as a young successful Israeli producer. |
| 7:30pm – 9:35pm |
Screening of the Beaufort film
The film tells the story of a military unit at the Beaufort post in South Lebanon. Five years after the Israeli troops evacuated Lebanon, Liraz Liberty, the unit commander, returns to the IDF’s last year on the Beaufort. This is a personal diary of a unit commander, in a small enclave, with its own rules and nomenclature.
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More about the Beaufort film
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The story takes place in the year 2000, the year of the IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The setting for the film is a 12th century Crusader stronghold in southern Lebanon, just prior to Israel's withdrawal from that country in 2000. Israel's sudden withdrawal from Beaufort and Lebanon after 18 years of occupation is the backdrop for Cedar's film, which outlines the daily routine of a group of soldiers, their feelings and their fears, and explores their moral dilemmas in the days preceding the withdrawal. The movie's director, himself an IDF veteran who was stationed in Lebanon, uses the stone walls of Beaufort castle as a symbol of the futility and endlessness of war. | The film was shot in northern Israel in the spring of 2006. Ironically, filming was completed in June, just a month before the second war in Lebanon broke out.
The movie made more than $500,000 in the first 3 weeks of its release in the Israeli market, a substantial amount for a domestic Israeli film. Since its release, it was viewed by over 300,000 viewers in Israel.
The casting has raised serious public criticism in Israel, especially from families of slain soldiers and war veterans, given the fact that three of the leading roles were played by Oshri Cohen, Itay Tiran, and Itay Turgeman, who are all actors who dodged the draft that exists in Israel.
More about the author: Ron Leshem (Hebrew: רון לשם; born December 20, 1976)
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An Israeli writer and media professional a deputy director in charge of programming at Channel Two, Israel’s main commercial television network. Author of the novel Im Yesh Gan Eden (Beaufort, 2005) won the Sapir Prize—Israel’s top literary award—in 2006 and the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military Literature. The film version of Beaufort, which Leshem coauthored with director Joseph Cedar, won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Silver Bear for Best Director. Leshem lives in Tel Aviv and is at work on his second novel.
He served as journalist and editor for Israeli periodicals Yedioth Ahronoth during the years 1998-2002 and Ma'ariv during the years 2002-2006 |
More about the Book
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By turns subversive and darkly comic, brutal and tender, Ron Leshem’s debut novel is an international literary sensation, winner of Israel’s top award for literature and the basis for a prizewinning film. Charged with brilliance and daring, hypnotic in its intensity, Beaufort is at once a searing coming-of-age story and a novel for our times—one of the most powerful, visceral portraits of the horror, camaraderie, and absurdity of war in modern fiction.
Beaufort. To the handful of Israeli soldiers occupying the ancient crusader fortress, it is a little slice of hell—a forbidding, fear-soaked enclave | perched Beaufort. To the handful of Israeli soldiers occupying the ancient crusader fortress, it is a little slice of hell—a forbidding, fear-soaked enclave perched atop two acres of land in southern Lebanon, surrounded by an enemy they cannot see. And to the thirteen young men in his command, Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Liraz “Erez” Liberti is a taskmaster, confessor, and the only hope in the face of attacks that come out of nowhere and missions seemingly designed to get them all killed.
All around them, tension crackles in the air. Long stretches of boredom and black humor are punctuated by flashes of terror. And the threat of death is constant. But in their stony haven, Erez and his soldiers have created their own little world, their own rules, their own language. And here Erez listens to his men build castles out of words, telling stories, telling lies, talking incessantly of women, sex, and dead comrades. Until, in the final days of the occupation, Erez and his squad of fed-up, pissed-off, frightened young soldiers are given one last order: a mission that will shatter all remaining illusions—and stand as a testament to the universal, gut-wrenching futility of war.
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