<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s Culture Minister Miki Zohar has said the government will freeze funding for the country\u2019s top film awards after the prize for best picture went to a film he described as “pro-Palestinian.”<\/p>\n
The Ophir awards, Israel\u2019s equivalent of the Oscars, gave its 2025 best film prize to Hayam, a story about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the occupied West Bank who dreams of travelling to Tel Aviv to see the sea. <\/p>\n
The film, directed by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, also won five other awards, including best actor for Mohammad Ghazaoui, making him the youngest-ever recipient.<\/p>\n
Winning the best film award automatically qualifies Hayam as Israel\u2019s submission to next year\u2019s Academy Awards in the international feature category.<\/p>\n
“After the pro-Palestinian film Hayam, which discredits our heroic soldiers as they fight to protect us, won the Best Film award at the shameful Ophir 2025 ceremony, I decided to stop funding the ceremony with Israeli citizens’ money,” Zohar said in a statement, adding the funding cut will take effect next year.<\/p>\n
At the awards ceremony, several artists dressed in black and called for an end to the carnage in Gaza.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.trtworld.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Israel\u2019s Culture Minister Miki Zohar has said the government will freeze funding for the country\u2019s top film awards after the prize for best picture went to a film he described as “pro-Palestinian.” The Ophir awards, Israel\u2019s equivalent of the Oscars, gave its 2025 best film prize to Hayam, a story about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2030157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2030156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Israel-freezes-film-awards-funding-after-pro-Palestinian-movie-wins-top.JPG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2030156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2030157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2030156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2030156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2030156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}