Samuel Maoz

Samuel Maoz, born in Tel Aviv around 1962, is an Israeli film director. At the age of twenty he served as a gunner in one of the first Israeli tanks to enter Lebanon in the 1982 Lebanon War, an experience he later turned into his first feature film, Lebanon (2009), the story of a four-man tank crew in a Lebanese village in the early days of the war. After the war he trained as a cameraman at the Beit Zvi theater school and did art direction in film and television, and as a director he was first associated with documentaries, including the Arte production Total Eclipse (2000). Lebanon won the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice International Film Festival in 2009 and the Best Screenplay award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in 2010. His next film, Foxtrot (2017), won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.