“Carrying a Bomb in My Suitcase”: An Interview with Israeli Filmmaker Nadav Lapid (Web Exclusive)
by Mitchell Abidor

Few filmmakers anywhere look upon their homelands with as jaundiced an eye as the Israeli Nadav Lapid. His previous films, Policeman (2011), The Kindergarten Teacher (2014), Synonyms (2019), and Ahed’s Knee (2021) show Israel as a pestiferous, racist nation whose citizens are complicit in its crimes. In Lapid’s vision, it is not just Israel as an entity that is worthy of condemnation: Israelis as individuals and a people are also —or above all—the guilty parties. Y, the lead character in his new film, Yes, speaks of how he had always thought that saying “no” to his country was heroic. If that is so, Lapid is the most heroic filmmaker imaginable. His rejection of everything about Israel is total, even more radical than the critiques of Israel we find in documentary films on the Occupation, the West Bank, the War of Independence, or the general oppression of Palestinians. For Lapid, the rot is far deeper and more widespread. The very foundations of Israeli life—Zionism, the military, and the national consensus surrounding them—demand rejection. In previous films, like Synonyms and Ahed’s Knee, characters who are stand-ins for Lapid literally exhaust themselves searching for words of disdain for Israel and Israelis. Synonyms goes so far as to show us a lead who, like Lapid, “flees,” as he says, Israel for Paris, planning never to return or to even speak Hebrew ever again.

In Yes, Lapid flips the script. Y (Ariel Bronz), a musician in Tel Aviv who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, Yasmine (Efrat Dor) and newborn baby—born the day after the massacres of October 7—decides that perhaps the true heroism is to say “yes” to Israel. The film is an account of his descent and degradation as he embraces Israeliness in all its horror: he consents to set to music a song, the “Anthem of the Victory Generation,” that calls for the “annihilation” and laying waste of Gaza. Saying “yes’’ to being Israeli means not only averting one’s gaze from the Occupation or the killing of Palestinians by settlers, it means accepting—nay, advocating and carrying out—genocide. Yes is a mighty “no” to all that.—Mitchell Abidor

Cineaste: Israeli film and filmmakers must negotiate a difficult road these days. You’re currently one of the most highly regarded filmmakers in Israel. Did you encounter problems from those calling for a boycott of the boycott or from the right-wing government?

Nadav Lapid: Making this film after October 7 became increasing difficult, while it became more and more important. There was huge fear on the part of European film foundations which had financed all my film. I felt their voices shaking when I spoke to them. Along with that, there was a kind of uprising by technicians and actors in Israel who refused to work or act in the film and everything I represent. There was a lack of comprehension of how art should shake our beliefs. This was before it was even released. When it was done, I felt like I had an extremely explosive bomb in my suitcase. The minister of culture produced a video saying I’d insulted our beautiful and pure soldiers, that I’d stolen Israel’s money and spit in its face. People attacked the movie without seeing it, in fact, refusing to see it. On the other side, the pro-boycott side, here was the most critical film about the situation, and it was made by an Israeli. This was a contradiction they couldn’t accept. In a way, I prefer a more explicit boycott. This phenomenon of fear, of lack of courage, is at its highest in North Americas. I feel myself caught in a Jewish joke, where the Jews call you an antisemite and the antisemites call you a Jew.

Cineaste: Choosing Ariel Bronz was something of a provocation. He’s a controversial figure in Israel, an actor who mocks the flag and who insists that Israelis confront their crimes.

Nadav Lapid: I chose Ariel Bronz not because he’s provocative but because of what he brings to the screen. He’s always defying, challenging, or testing something.

Cineaste: The scene in the car, when Lea [Naama Preiss] and Y are driving to Gaza and she graphically describes the Hamas killings of October 7, is a wrenching one, probably the strongest one in the film emotionally. Many people I know were surprised by it, feeling it made the case for the war and diminished the genocide.

Nadav Lapid: The scene in the car was confusing because we live in a time when people feel the role of film is to give an audiovisual version of their opinions; this is how they measure a film. If it doesn’t confirm my opinion, it’s a bad film. Film today is threatened in a clear and explicit way, not just by right-wing authoritarianism and censorship but also by a vulgar way of evaluating films. Vulgar because it sabotages the liberty of the artist. Yes is about the Israeli collective soul at this moment—and not just Israel’s; it also applies to America. A big part of the Israeli collective soul is the seventh of October. The movie doesn’t justify anything; it doesn’t say that the genocide is only an act of vengeance.

Cineaste: The anthem that Y writes the music for is quite a horrific work, and it’s all the worse for being a real song that was really written and performed by a children’s chorus calling for the “annihilation” of Gaza.

Nadav Lapid: It’s hard to show in a more explicit way the obscenity of Israeli society. The film shows Israeli kids singing a new anthem, an anthem of destruction and genocide. I wrote this film in November 2023. Who was using the word genocide in November 2023? What is an anthem? It’s the melody of a nation sung by young kids, which means the future is even worse than the present. October 7 happened, and it became an extremely important ingredient of the culture.

Cineaste: There’s a line in your film Policeman that could apply to Yes: His disease was loving Israel.

Nadav Lapid: You can describe me and all my films by that quote.

Cineaste: In Policeman, again, the father of one of the revolutionaries was once a member of the revolutionary anti-Zionist Matzpen. Do you feel an affinity for that now-almost-totally vanished left?

Nadav Lapid: I feel myself to be a total product of this country. I served in the army and was a good soldier, whatever that means. When I was young, I dreamt of being an Israeli hero. I grew up with the myth; I grew up with the vanity that people from Tel Aviv feel, that it’s the greatest city on earth. The collusion within this society is all-powerful and omnipresent. I’m always in a state of admiration for the few who succeed in detaching themselves from this. You can change your perspective, but it’s much harder to separate yourself from European values. There’s always a kind of aura in the way I show soldiers in my films. I always have the feeling that my script hates Israelis, but my camera loves them.

Cineaste: It strikes me that the filmmaker you most resemble is Radu Jude. Jude detests Romania in the same way you detest Israel and, like you, he insists on reminding his compatriots of their failings and flaws.

Nadav Lapid: He’s a good friend. There’s another similarity between us in the way we are both trying to dig into the contemporary chaos. We share the feeling that a movie cannot stay clean when it’s filled with filth. A movie should be filthy and chaotic and polluted. It should be part of its time, and not only in its message. I think, though, that he’s more analytical and in my films there is more pathos. I feel my films are very romantic. Romantic in the sense that there’s always a kind of quest for redemption. In Policeman, there’s the policeman looking sorrowfully at the woman he killed; there’s the main character in Kindergarten Teacher who gives herself up; and in Yes there’s the ending, when they look at each other and go nowhere, but they do it together.,

Cineaste: Y’s mother and her cynical or perhaps realistic comments about her fellow Israelis are a resounding “no.” At one point, she even says that Y had no reason to feel like he wasn’t doing his part because he served in the army orchestra and not in a military unit, saying, “Let the neighbor’s sons get killed.”

Nadav Lapid: As an example of someone who’s freed herself from Israeli convictions, the Israeli consensus, there’s my mother. But I also saw that the price you pay is that you become a merciless person. You need to detach yourself from fake humanistic values and beliefs. But when you erase this, you also erase a kind of basic empathy. When you live in Israel feeling that you live in the land of the enemy, and that Israelis are your enemies. Imagine what it’s like to feel forever surrounded by the enemy.

Cineaste: What was the moment you broke with the Israeli consensus?

Nadav Lapid: The moment I experienced my break was, in an unconscious way, when I finished my military service. I had to go through the feeling of belonging in order to detach myself. Like I said, during my military service my only dream was to become a hero. It wasn’t even a political thing: it was an emotional thing, which is much more powerful. Nothing represents Israeli cohesion more than military service. There are people who can do the opposite in their minds; I had to cross the line physically. I had to climb the hill of Israeliness to go down into the valley. In this way, my films are different and distinguish themselves from other left-wing fiction films. I think most Israeli political films are focused on certain political issues—checkpoints, the Occupation, Sabra and Shatila, racism—and they might propose a solution. In my films, what I aim at is the collective soul, the collective story, Checkpoints are, for me, only the inevitable consequence. I’m looking at the collective soul as it’s presented in daily life. Soldiers serve at checkpoints, but they also kiss, dance, eat breakfast. My films are more indirect and more radical.

Cineaste: If saying “No” to Israel and saying “Yes” to Israel are both equally futile, as your films demonstrate, what is there?

Nadav Lapid: In my films, the people dance—they really dance—in limbo. It expresses my state of mind. I physically left Israel [for France], but I still shoot movies there. There’s this incapacity of my ending this dance of love and hate.

Cineaste: So, if “No” doesn’t work and “Yes” doesn’t work, what works?

Lapid: [Long pause] Turn your back on this place and never look back. But that’s not true. I turned my back but came back to shoot Yes. Luckily, filmmakers don’t have to provide solutions. 

Mitchell Abidor is author, among other books, of a new biography of writer, historian, and revolutionary Victor Serge published by Pluto Press.

Yes is distributed in the United States by Kino Lorber and is currently available on DVD.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 3