A linguistics professor (Shlomo Bar-Aba) and Talmud expert at the University of Jerusalem is far more conservative and significantly less successful than his highly lauded son and contemporary (Lior Ashkenazi). When the elderly scholar receives official word that he is to receive Israel's highest honor for his work, he feels vindicated after a lifetime of methodical labor, which puts the son in a moral quandary when he is informed that a grievous mistake has been made and the honor was actually intended to go to him. Joseph Cedar's "Footnote" is an impeccably constructed film which strains to be quirky, audacious, and self-aware early on but quickly reveals how deep and layered its story is, with a great moral conundrum which it refuses to compromise.
