Leaving Lebanon Behind; An Israeli director is honored for his unsparing new film.(Joseph Cedar)

Byline: Joanna Chen

At the Berlin Film Festival last month, Joseph Cedar looked more like a bashful schoolboy than a director to rival Robert De Niro and Steven Soderbergh. So it was especially surprising when the Israeli filmmaker beat out those two veterans for the festival's best-director prize for his latest movie, "Beaufort," about the abrupt Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, after 18 years of occupation. Set in a concrete maze of bunkers and trenches atop a mountain outpost, the film follows a group of soldiers battling not so much the enemy as their own fears for survival. In a stroke of precipitous timing, the film--which opens in Israel this week and globally later this year--was completed just five weeks before the second Lebanon war broke out in July 2006, plunging Israel and its northern neighbor into a fresh round of fighting.

Cedar's award is one of the highest honors ever bestowed on an Israeli director. Until recently, film was not considered a high priority by the country's cultural establishment. But over the past five years, more funding has been allocated to the industry--and it's paying off. Last year a Palestinian-Israeli co-production, "Paradise Now," reaped a Golden Globe for its provocative presentation of suicide bombers; two other films, "Sweet Mud" and "The Bubble," received accolades at this year's Sundance and Berlin festivals. "Cedar comes from a new, more self-aware generation of Israeli filmmakers who are not afraid to expose their social concerns to the world and are being given a chance to show it," says film critic Nahman Ingber, the artistic director of the Rabinovich Foundation, which funds Israeli films. "He knows how to hold your soul when he tells a story."

Cedar's background certainly gives him plenty of fodder for his craft. His family emigrated from New York when he was a child, and he grew up in an Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem with five brothers and sisters. In his first two films, "Time of ...