Israel Oscar ‘The Sea’ seeks compassion amid conflict

The director of Israel’s 2026 Oscar entry about a Palestinian boy’s quest to see the sea hopes it will help spark compassion in his homeland during so much conflict.

The prospects for lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians have rarely looked so bleak following the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, two years of war in Gaza and increasing settler violence in the West Bank.

However, director and writer Shai Carmeli-Pollak has taken heart from the reception to his film The Sea which won Israel’s top film prize and was thus automatically submitted for the foreign-language Academy Award to be decided in March. “I met the audience that came to see it and it was amazing that people could be emotional and sometimes tearful about this story when violence and atrocities happened not far from here,” Carmeli-Pollak said in an interview this week after a screening.

The Sea tells the story of Khaled, a Palestinian boy in the Israeli-occupied West Bank who fears growing up without seeing the sea and makes the perilous journey alone and without travel documents to Israel to try to reach the shore. He had recently been turned away at a checkpoint on a school trip to the sea, and his sudden disappearance from home prompts his father, an undocumented worker in Israel, to risk arrest by setting out in search of him.

The Sea won Best Film at September’s Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars, drawing condemnation from Culture Minister Miki Zohar, who pulled funding from the ceremony for the film’s depiction of the Israeli army.

Israel’s 2022 government is one of the most right-wing in its history, staunchly opposed to a Palestinian state and committed to expanding settlements in the West Bank. Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people, has hardened many Israelis against the Palestinians and made criticism of the military more sensitive.

“Compassion and Love”

Carmeli-Pollak and his Israeli-Palestinian producer The SeaBaher Agbaria, said it is important to make films that help people hear each other’s stories. “I hope the film will open other channels – channels of compassion and love – and give other ways to live together in this place,” he told Reuters.

Agbaria said he felt surprised to bring a Palestinian story to mainstream cinemas in Israel in the context of the war. “Because (of) what’s going on, it’s time for this movie as well, you know, for this kind of story, to listen to others,” he said.

The film was released in Israeli cinemas in July and continues to run.

At the Oscars 2025, an Israeli-Palestinian film No other land, about Israel’s displacement of a Palestinian community in the West Bank, won the award for feature documentary, also angering the Israeli government.

Carmeli-Pollak, a longtime peace activist, said that although the government did not want to represent Israel, he was proud to be part of a community of filmmakers who chose to honor The Sea. “I represent every people, including Israelis and Palestinians, who aspire to peace and equality and to live together in a different way than this government is working towards.”