The Paris-based Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid wrote his new feature, “Yes,” before the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Afterward, he returned to his home country, a place that has often been the subject of blistering criticism in his well-reviewed features. When he arrived there, he was overtaken by two contradictory feelings.
“On one hand I felt, strangely for me at least, a kind of empathy and tenderness because there was a feeling of agony, and there’s something tender about agony,” he said. That didn’t last long, however. “It was pretty quickly replaced by this — how would I call it? — this morbid vivacity.”
You see that in “Yes,” which tries to capture what Lapid called “this most terrible and dark party, the party of a nation that was consciously, in a way, giving away any single moral constraint.”
These conflicting emotions are what make the film a uniquely confrontational and controversial cinematic undertaking.
The story focuses on Y (Ariel Bronz) and Yasmin (Efrat Dor), married performers in Tel Aviv who have become entertainers and, at times, sex workers for the ruling class. They are full participants in this delirious hedonism while the Gaza war plays out in the distance, but are aware of their complicity and are eager for an escape. An out comes in the form of an assignment for Y: A Russian oligarch will pay him to compose the music for an anthem celebrating the bombing of Gaza. The song is based on real-life propaganda released by the Civil Front, a group that supports the Israel Defense Forces.
“In ‘Yes,’ smiles are answered by screams and screams are answered by yet more smiles, and on and on it goes,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. But while the notices have been almost uniformly positive, the film is nonetheless a lightning rod, provoking both those who support Israel and who don’t.
Lapid’s film has been repeatedly condemned by Israel’s minister of culture, Miki Zohar. The lead actor, Bronz, was detained for posting a poem critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September, shortly after the film won prizes at the Ophir Awards, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars.
In the United States, where the film opened in March after premiering at Cannes last May, Lapid has run into different headwinds. Many prominent filmmakers signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions. “Yes” is partly financed by the Israel Film Fund.
Lapid explained in a video interview that not only did “Yes” receive money from the fund before the war — the organization approved the initial version of the script that did not reference Oct. 7 — the fund is itself not connected to the Ministry of Culture. Still, Lapid and his collaborators made the film as secretly as possible.
“We were shooting the movie under the radar because we were anxious, because we were afraid,” he said, adding that some Israeli actors and crew members refused to join the production. It was “as if we were shooting in the land of the enemy.”
But Lapid has never been shy about using film to confront his discomfort with Israeli nationalism. His debut feature, “Policeman,” released in the United States in 2014, features a character, about to take a wealthy businessman hostage, describing the state as “cruel, racist, violent and ignorant.” In “Ahed’s Knee” (2022), a filmmaker not unlike Lapid goes head to head with a young woman from the Ministry of Culture after she asks him to sign a document agreeing to speak only on approved topics at a post-screening session.
Internationally, Lapid’s work has been praised. “Synonyms” (2019), about an Israeli expat in Paris, won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. “Ahed’s Knee” won the Jury Prize at Cannes, essentially third place.
“His filmmaking style has a European sensibility, and I’d say that’s where he really stands out,” Isaac Zablocki, a senior director of film programs at the J.C.C. Manhattan, said. “He’s obviously not the most popular director in Israel. He’s the most popular Israeli director in Europe at the moment.”
Yet Lapid said that he had encountered resistance to “Yes” on the way to its release.
“The path that the movie is crossing, all over but in a way especially in North America and the U.S., is for me such a revelation of the measure of this fear,” he said.
He added, referring to film festivals and distributors, “I think that they recognize that, or in their head, they thought that they might pay a price due to a film like ‘Yes,’” he said.
The film ultimately landed with the distributor Kino Lorber, which also released “Ahed’s Knee,” “Synonyms” and “The Kindergarten Teacher’ (2015). The company’s chairman, Richard Lorber, said he was disappointed that the New York Film Festival didn’t program it, unlike those earlier movies. (The festival’s organizer, Film at Lincoln Center, did not respond to a request for comment.) But, Lorber added, Kino was not the only distributor interested in “Yes,” and the reaction from audiences has been nuanced.
“I think the reality is that people who actually have seen the film come away thinking, I don’t really understand what people are opposed to here,” Lorber said. “The film raises so many conflicting issues and puts them in different perspectives.”
One reason “Yes” is perceived as so explosive is that it is told from the point of view of the “predators,” Lapid said.
“I’ve said it 10,000 times: The Israelis are the bad ones in the story and we committed genocide,” he said, adding, “It doesn’t reduce the fact that when art is trying to deal with such an event, both points of views and both universes are necessary.”
He imagined the film as if “The Zone of Interest,” the 2023 drama about the family life of the commandant of Auschwitz, were made by the Austrian director Fritz Lang in the midst of World War II. In Lapid’s version, Y and Yasmin lead an extravagant dance party to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” that at times turns sinister. The wealthy attendees dunk Y’s head in various liquids until he seems to be gasping for breath.
Midway through “Yes,” the throbbing club soundtrack dissipates as Y heads to the border to seek inspiration for his song. There he meets an ex-lover, Leah (Naama Preis), who has been translating propaganda in the wake of the attack.
Just as Lapid felt it was necessary to depict Gaza in the film, he believed “the 7th of October should exist in the movie.” Leah delivers a monologue detailing the stories she has learned about the day. Lapid said he didn’t know how he wanted the moment to end, rather, he wanted to see “how the existence of the words impact the soul, impact the face.”
Lapid shot the sequence near Gaza in chronological order, and the closer his characters get, the more they see smoke rising and hear what he called “endless explosions.” He singled out a moment when the camera pans from Y and Leah to Gaza: “You make like 180 degrees and you go from fiction to documentary, from Jews to Palestinians and you frame the worst.”
Bronz — a writer and performance artist who, in his words, specializes in “highly political theater “ — described filming those scenes as “totally surreal and totally also in a way realistic.”
“People in Tel Aviv and in Israel — in the same time that people are going in flames — they are trying to keep normality and keep real life going on,” Bronz said.
That quality is also what Lapid said makes “Yes” accessible to viewers outside Israel. Audiences around the world know what it’s like to go about their daily lives while notifications about war pop up on their phones. He also knows the film he made is “as sensitive as a nuclear bomb.”
“I can’t imagine doing anything else in such a moment,” he said.
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