- Director Majid Majidi - Director Asghar Farhadi - Director Saeed Roustayi - Director Bahman Farmanara - Director Bahram Beyzai - Director Ali Hatami - Director Dariush Mehrjui - Director Israel History of the industry The history of Israeli cinema is so closely related to the history of the state of Israel itself since some of the wars and international conflicts that the country has started or been involved in inspired Israeli film directors and gave rise to the different periods of the nation's film industry. Some authors consider 1948 as the year in which the Israeli film industry was born along with the establishment of the state of Israel, others hold that its trajectory dates back to the 1920s when the silent films of Ya'akov Ben-Dov and other Israeli film directors made their appearance, but what they all agree on is that Zionist Realism Cinema dominated the industry until the 1950s. The films of this cinematic current were part of the propagandistic material used by Zionist organizations during the pre-statehood period to encourage the migration of European Jews to Palestine, they emphasized the agricultural way of living in the land of Palestine and featured traditional symbols that Jews could relate to, such as the Star of David and the Menorah. Between the end of World War II and the declaration of the Jewish state, Israeli films portrayed holocaust survivors and their journey to escape their tragic past of persecution, homelessness, and desolation in order to become true Israelis and fulfill their "duty" to claim the land, build settlements, and begin a new life in Palestine. Post-1948 films shifted from the Holocaust theme and started to highlight the new Israeli 'heroes', mainly the soldiers and the 'Sabras' (newborn Israelis). After the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict, these films were one way in which the new state forged a nationalist narrative and portrayed how the perfect Hebrew Israeli men should be This branch of the Zionist Realism genre is called the Heroic-Nationalist Cinema. In the 1960s-70s, two new film genres were born. The first one, the Bourekas films, named after a popular local pastry, were comedies and melodramas that depicted the inter-ethnic conflict between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, which generally was resolved by means of the consummation of a mixed marriage. The ingenuity of Bourekas filmmakers was, on one hand, their ability to use comedy and sentimentalism as a way to