Yossef (Joseph) Cedar (Hebrew: יוסף סידר; born August 31, 1968) is an Israeli film director and screenwriter. He has won a Silver Bear and an Ophir Award for Best Director, and an Ophir Award for writing a Best Screenplay. He also won the best screenplay award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for his film Footnote (2011).
Cedar was born in New York. When he was 6 his family moved to Israel, and he grew up in the Bayit VeGan neighborhood in Jerusalem. He studied in a Yeshiva High School. In the Israeli army he served as a paratrooper. After graduating in Philosophy and History of theatre from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he studied cinema studies in the New York University. When he came back to Israel he started working on the screenplay for his debut film, Time of Favor (2000), for which he moved and lived for 2 years in the Israeli settlement Dolev. The film became a big success and won 6 Ofir Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
His second film was Campfire (2004) who was also a success with 5 Ofir Academy Awards including Best Picture, with 2 of them, Best Director and Best Screenplay, going to Cedar. For Beaufort (2007), his third film, he received the Silver Bear award for Best Director in the Berlin International Film Festival. Beaufort became one of the most critically acclaimed and successful Israeli films of the decade and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the first such nomination for an Israeli film in 24 years. It also received 4 Ofir Academy Awards and was based on Cedar's own experiences during his army service on Israel's border with Lebanon.
Cedar is an Orthodox Jew. His films are known to touch delicate issues of Israeli society. Israeli critic Yair Rave wrote: One of the reasons I like Cedar's films so much is... his ability to merge the Israeli spirit... with the universal cinematic codes. His upcoming film Footnote was premiered In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
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