Like both Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Beaufort represents war as pointless and absurd from the perspective of the soldier on the ground. It tells the story of a small group of Israeli soldiers charged with guarding a historically significant, though by now tactically irrelevant, fort − incidentally called Beaufort − that was built during the Crusades, and captured by Israel in the 1982 invasion. 1In recent years, three Israeli filmmakers (and former soldiers), have begun to treat the war in Lebanon in ways that are formally innovative, referential, and autobiographical.ĢJoseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007) is set at the time of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.