Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar's Beaufort

One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema is the number of films that explore repressed traumatic events from the First Lebanon War—events that have been denied entry into the shared national past. This essay analyzes Joseph Cedar's film Beaufort (2007), arguing that the film exposes a traumatic rupture between history and memory. Yet at the same time, Beaufort nostalgically expresses an impossible yearning for lost archival collective national memory.