Born to a well-heeled Israeli family, he is an unwavering leftist and one of his country’s most consistent internal critics. His name, Mograbi, is synonymous with the glamour of the cinema for most Israelis, given his family history.1 But his films are deeply independent affairs, often displaying the roughness of television journalism. Mograbi is a socially engaged filmmaker, and yet he often plays the role of a curious but blinkered bourgeois, speaking directly to his audience as the flustered, put-upon mensch, if not an outright schlemiel.