New Season Online
For our fourth film of 2021 we’ve chosen Foxtrot from Israeli director Samuel Maoz, released in 2017. A follow-up to his award winning Lebanon (2009), the film was inspired by an incident, 20 years earlier, when his daughter, on her way to school, narrowly avoided death in a random terrorist attack. That an equally serendipitous sequence of events ensured her survival was never forgotten by Maoz and subsequently became the basis of his examination in Foxtrot of what writer Paul Auster called ‘the music of chance’.
The film won the Silver Lion award at the 2017 Venice Film festival and was Israel’s shortlisted Oscar nomination for that year.
Maintaining past ABCD practice, we’ve produced a Programme Note for the film which is attached to this Newsletter, with April 29th at 7.30pm being set for a Zoom meeting to exchange your impressions of it. If you wish to partake in this event, please access the link in the Programme Note for the meeting particulars. (You will of course need to have the Zoom ‘app’ installed on your computer.)
For those who wish to send in reactions individually, please Email info@abfilms.org.uk with your score (A → E) and comments. These reactions and comments will be published on the ABCD Website (https://abfilms.org.uk) and/or included in the Zoom discussion relevant to the film. You will also find the scores and comments for March’s film Citizen Kane on the Website.
Reviewing Foxtrot for Eye for Film, Anne-Katrin Titze wrote “Maoz seizes the heart and lets our brains catch up with the metaphors. Foxtrot is a film about family structures, […] mourning, boredom and disconnection. [It] ultimately lays open [our] complicity in the production of fate.”
The film is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.