UK-Israel Co-Production: Treaty Terms and Current State

What the Treaty Actually Says

The UK-Israel Film Co-Production Agreement was signed on November 3, 2010 in Jerusalem by then-UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and entered into force on August 19, 2011. Per the treaty text published by the UK government (Cm 8346, Treaty Series No. 28, 2012), either party may terminate with six months’ notice in writing — no such notice has been reported by either government, so the agreement remains formally in force.

Per the treaty’s own annex, the financial structure requires each co-producer’s contribution to fall between 20% and 80% of the budget for a straightforward UK-Israel co-production, which competent authorities can jointly widen to 10-90%. Where a third-party or finance-only co-producer is also involved, the treaty allows up to four co-producers with contribution bands adjusted accordingly. The same annex caps spend sourced from outside the UK, Israel, an EEA state, or a qualifying third co-producer’s territory at one-fifth of the total — and post-production work is explicitly included in that local-spend requirement, not treated separately — while a separate clause requires at least 90% of footage to be newly shot for the production. Tax benefits, notably, are not shared: UK relief goes to the UK co-producer, Israeli incentives to the Israeli side, even though the treaty grants “national film” status to the project in both countries — a structural detail that surprises producers assuming co-production automatically means shared fiscal benefit.

Real Projects Made Under the Treaty

Zaytoun (2012), a Bedlam Productions (UK) and Far Films (Israel) co-production starring Stephen Dorff and directed by Eran Riklis, was the first film made under the newly ratified treaty. Nearly a decade later, My Happy Ending — produced in 2021 and released in 2023, starring Andie MacDowell and Miriam Margolyes — became the first UK-Israel co-production backed by the BFI-administered UK Global Screen Fund, structured between UK companies Archface Films and Big Book Media and Israeli companies Pie Films, with financing from Media Finance Capital and United King Films.

Not every UK-Israel screen collaboration uses this treaty structure. We Will Dance Again, the 2024 documentary about the October 7 Nova festival attack that won a 2025 News & Documentary Emmy, was a co-commission between Paramount’s See It Now Studios, BBC Storyville, and Israel’s Hot Channel 8 — a broadcaster arrangement, not a BFI/treaty-certified “Approved Co-production.” Producers should be careful not to conflate the two; only the latter carries the formal treaty benefits described above.

The Current State of the Corridor

No treaty-certified UK-Israel co-production has been publicly confirmed since My Happy Ending in 2023, and the BFI’s most recent disclosed UK Global Screen Fund co-production round (June 2025) named ten partner territories — Brazil, Canada, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland — with no Israel-partnered project among them. That absence lines up with direct trade-press reporting on the state of Israeli production activity. Adar Shaffran, head of Israel’s producers’ association, told Variety (June 20, 2025), during the Israel-Iran missile exchange: “Right now, nobody is working, all the industry is on hold. We’re waiting for things to calm down.”

Veteran Israeli producer Shula Spiegel told the Times of Israel (July 21, 2025) that international buyers have grown reluctant to work with Israeli productions since the war began: “We’re not succeeding in selling our programming overseas. They don’t want to hear from us.” For a producer evaluating this corridor today, the accurate picture is that the treaty’s legal machinery is real, workable, and has produced genuine films historically — but current cross-border activity has visibly slowed since 2023, and any deal timeline should account for that rather than assume normal pre-2023 conditions.

How This Fits Alongside Israel’s Own Financing Landscape

For the broader Israeli incentive landscape a UK co-producer would be structuring against, Vitrina’s Israeli TV and film co-production guide covers the Fund for the Promotion of Foreign Productions and Israel’s other national mechanisms in detail. For the UK side of the structure, the UK production finance and commissioning guide covers AVEC tax relief and the PACT terms-of-trade framework that would govern the UK co-producer’s own tax benefit under this treaty. Producers structuring any bilateral treaty deal more generally can also reference Vitrina’s guide to finding and vetting international co-production partners, and the film and TV co-production tax breaks comparison for how this treaty’s fiscal split compares to other bilateral structures.

Once a co-production structure like this is in place, the remaining financing questions are largely the same ones covered elsewhere on Vitrina: the production financing checklist for documentation, the gap financing guide and completion bond guide for closing and de-risking the remaining budget, and the film licensing deals guide for structuring distribution once the co-produced project is complete.

One practical point worth flagging for anyone actually evaluating this corridor today: the treaty’s mechanics — the certification process, the contribution bands, the cultural test — haven’t changed and remain fully usable the moment cross-border activity picks back up. What’s changed is the pipeline of new projects entering that process, not the process itself. A producer with an existing Israeli partner relationship, or a project already in advanced development before 2023, is in a meaningfully different position than one starting a UK-Israel search from scratch in the current environment.

Frequently Asked Questions