Footnote, the Movie - For a Local Audience?

If the new Israeli movie, "Footnote," comes your way, you should see it, though seeing it here in Jerusalem is unlike seeing it anywhere else in the world. The movie is about a closed world within a closed world: the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University. But it's about a huge subject: the relations between fathers and sons.
The film obviously means a great deal more for someone who lives here, and who could more or less identify every location in the film, and who knows people very much like the characters in the film, than it could for someone abroad, who doesn't speak Hebrew, who doesn't have the slightest idea what the Jerusalem Talmud is or why anyone cares about its text.
But I think that most successful works of art address a local audience first, and, if they're good, a broader audience can eavesdrop on the local conversation. At the recent Jerusalem film festival, we saw movies from Albania, India, Israel, and Greece. I know virtually nothing about Albania and very little about India, but those local films, about local people, with personal problems, were accessible to me and meaningful to me. Obviously I didn't have the flash of recognition that a local audience would have had upon seeing a familiar landmark, but I could identify.
The best art, I maintain, is intimacy overheard. That's why an intense group of creative people, living close to one another, can stimulate great work: the poet writes first for the poets around him, the painter paints first for his painter friends, the novelists critique each other's manuscripts. That personal interest in the work going on in the group creates a potential interest for the audience.