Tali Shalom-Ezer was at home in Tel Aviv when she received the news that her first full-length film, Surrogate, was to have its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. “I was very excited,” she says. “It is such an honour and it made me so happy.”

Her delight, however, was short-lived. A few days later, the director, Ken Loach, urged film lovers to boycott the festival on the grounds that the organisers accepted £300 from the Israeli embassy to pay Shalom-Ezer’s travel costs.

“The massacres and state terrorism in Gaza make this money unacceptable,” said Loach, whose own film, Looking for Eric, was the toast of the Cannes festival. “With regret, I must urge all who might consider visiting the festival to show their support for the Palestinian nation and stay away.”

Shalom-Ezer, 31, heard about his call to arms from a member of the production team who worked with her on Surrogate, a love story set in a sex therapy clinic. It came as a blow, particularly, she says, because she is a fan of Loach’s work, and his comments stung.

“He said that he was not calling for a boycott of my film but a boycott of the festival for using Israeli money. This is hypocritical. My film, like all films made in Israel, was paid for by the Israeli Film Fund, which gets money from the government. So he was saying that no-one should see Israeli films. Also, generalising all Israeli citizens as warmongers and racists is racism and that is wrong.”

Loach, meanwhile, won backing from the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign who issued a rallying call on their website, encouraging supporters to picket red-carpet events during the festival.

It didn’t take the EIFF long to bow to pressure. Within days the money was returned to the Israeli embassy and the organisers agreed to fund Shalom-Ezer’s travel from the festival budget.

Was she happy with the compromise? “Happy, no,” she says. “I was surprised that the festival chose to do that. They chose to take Ken Loach’s words as representative of the global film community and that bothered me.”

Shalom-Ezer, a graduate of Tel Aviv University’s film school, is regarded as one of Israel’s most talented young film-makers. She describes her films as “intimate dramas”, in which she examines relationships with a forensic eye. What she is not is a political film-maker. Surrogate, the story of a troubled young man who pays a sexual therapist to help him, is set in Israel but makes no overt mention of the Middle East conflict.

But as an Israeli film-maker seeking an international audience, is it possible to separate politics from art? “For me, I make films as art and my art does not deal with the Israeli Palestinian conflict,” she says. “Now I feel I am in a strange position because I am answering questions that are related to politics as if I am a representative of the Israeli state and I don’t want to be that.”

Shalom-Ezer feels that cultural and academic boycotts aimed at unpopular regimes do more harm than good. “Art is an opportunity to break through political boundaries,” she says. Every time a country is subjected to a cultural boycott there is a tendancy among its people to draw closer to more nationalistic elements.

“I am aware that there are a lot of anti-zionist views and opposition to a Jewish state but I believe that cultural boycotts make the situation more problematic because they expel the country from international discourse. A lot of people didn’t support Britain being part of the war in Iraq — does that mean British art should be subjected to a cultural boycott?”

Shalom-Ezer grew up in Kfar-Saba, a small town outside Tel Aviv. Her father, an Iraqi Jew, moved to Israel in the 1950s, and her Romanian mother arrived a decade later. At the age of 14, Shalom-Ezer joined a left-wing youth group that staged demonstrations against Israeli occupation and illegal settlements. “I have always campaigned for peace and justice but politics is really not my main activity,” she says.

Surrogate, her first feature film, took first prize at the 2008 International Women’s Film Festival in Israel.

In two weeks’ time, Shalom-Ezer will arrive in Edinburgh for the first showing of Surrogate outside Israel. The political row may have tainted her visit, but she is still looking forward to the trip and seeing the reaction of a foreign audience.

She would also very much like Ken Loach to attend the screening. “He says he is not against Israeli artists and coming to see my film would be a good way of showing that,” she says. “I would like to invite him to see it in Edinburgh. I hope he will come.”

Surrogate is on at the EIFF on Sunday, June 21 and Saturday, June 27. For tickets go to www.edfilmfest.org.uk

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