The movie Beaufort tells the story of Liraz Liberti (Oshri Cohen) a volatile, 22-year-old outpost commander and his troops.

The year is 2000, and Israeli forces are preparing to withdraw from the mountaintop outpost of Beaufort Castle, where they've been stationed. Frustrated by the knowledge that they are risking—and often losing—their lives in defense of a fortress that will soon be abandoned, the men struggle to do their duty while grieving for their dead comrades and preparing for the evacuation.

In addition to Liraz, the other characters include the amiable, romantic Oshri (Eli Eltonyo) and Koris (Itay Tiran), the unit's brooding, cynical conscience. They are visited, at the beginning, by Ziv (Ohad Knoller), a bomb-defusing specialist who has been sent to help clear a road that may be booby-trapped.

The film shows the daily routine of a group of soldiers, their feelings and their fears, and explores their moral dilemmas.

The film's director, Joseph Cedar, is an IDF veteran who was stationed in Lebanon during the first Lebanon war. He uses the stone walls of Beaufort Castle as a symbol of the futility and endlessness of war. The men spend most of their time inside its heavily fortified walls, in spacesuit-like combat gear, bracing for the next round of attacks from an invisible enemy. Their lives are governed by tedium, claustrophobia and anxiety. Their impending departure has brought intensified shelling from Hezbollah, which wants the long-planned evacuation to look like a retreat under fire. Cedar has crafted a riveting reminder of the frustrations and futility of war.

The movie was shot in the spring of 2006 at Nimrod Fortress, a similar mountaintop fort in northern Israel. Ironically, filming was completed in June, just a month before the second war in Lebanon broke out.

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly called Beaufort “...a movie of tremendous power—nerve-racking, astute, and neutral enough to apply to all soldiers, in all wars, everywhere.”

Beaufort won an award for best director at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award this year. This is the seventh Academy Award nomination for Israel. Previous nominees were:

Beyond The Walls (1984), Operation Thunderbolt (1977), The House On Chelouche Street (1973), I Love You Rosa (1972), The Policeman (1971) and Sallah (1964), all nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.