JERUSALEM (AFP).- Israeli filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi, the country's only director of an Oscar-winning film, is to be buried in Tel Aviv on Monday following his death last week, friends and colleagues said.

The 86-year-old director of the Academy Award-winning 1977 film "Madame Rosa", which was filmed in France and starred Simone Signoret, died on Friday.

He also directed two other Oscar-nominated films in the 1970s: "I Love You Rosa" and "The House on Chelouche Street".

"Madame Rosa", the story of a former prostitute in Paris who had survived the Auschwitz death camp, won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, representing France.

It was an adaptation of the novel "The Life Before Us" by French author Romain Gary, written under the pseudonym Emile Ajar.

Born in 1931 in Egypt, Mizrahi emigrated to what was then British Mandatory Palestine in 1946 with his mother and brother.

His brother was killed in an Egyptian air strike in the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation.

He studied film in France in the 1950s and spent much of his career there before returning to Israel.

His other films included "Every Time We Say Goodbye", set in Jerusalem and released in 1986 starring Tom Hanks.

Regine Mihal Friedman, a retired professor of film studies at Tel Aviv University where Mizrahi also taught, called him "an extremely special figure in Israeli cinema" but also beyond.

"For example, what is very striking in Moshe Mizrahi's films is the place he gives to women," she told AFP.

Israeli actress Gila Almagor, who appeared in several of his films, told Israeli news site Walla that he "brought a European touch to Israeli cinema".


© Agence France-Presse