The Israel Film Council run by the Ministry of Culture and Sport approved Oct. 3 funding for three regional film funds as part of a series of reforms led by Culture Minister Miri Regev. Two of the new funds are located in northern Israel, one to be run by the Nof Hagalil Culture Center through the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, the other by the Galilee Film Fund. The third will operate in the West Bank and will be run by the Samaria Community Center. Eight million Israeli shekels ($2.29 million) was allocated for the funds’ annual budget, but the amounts for each were not reported. Will the division be equitable or will the Samaria Community Center enjoy a preferential allocation by the right-wing government? According to the Ynet website, half the total budget, some 4.1 million shekels ($1.17 million), will go to the Samaria fund and the rest will be divided between the Galilee funds.

The new funds are part of a series of so-called reforms Regev instituted to increase state funding for cultural enterprises in the country’s southern and northern regions, as well as in ultra-Orthodox and non-Jewish communities.

Support for filmmakers, mostly of documentaries, living outside the Tel Aviv bubble who might otherwise have been unable to promote their work through Tel Aviv-based culture funds appears a welcome initiative. Why the caveat? Because in 2019, the Culture Ministry under Regev already changed its support methods. The veteran funds, which yielded impressive achievements for Israeli filmmaking domestically and on the world stage, are obliged from now on to discuss funding requests without knowing the identity of the applicants. In other words, the film fund lectors discuss the story and the script but not the identity of the artist. They do not know who requested the funding, and accept or reject applications based solely on professional criteria. Not only that, from now on the lectors themselves are a mixture of artists from the center and the periphery, Jews and Arabs. Some are residents of the West Bank, meaning settlers.

The best funding method found in Israel so far is for film funds to operate in conjunction with established university or college film departments. The Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, for example, is an active participant in an initiative promoting filmmaking in Israel’s south in cooperation with the film department of the Sapir Academic College in the Gaza border town of Sderot. The new funds, however, will be administered by nongovernmental organizations (in the case of the Galilee funds) and by a community center, which is in fact part of the Samaria Regional Council.