Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid isn’t shy about his disgust toward his home country. A body of work examining Israel with a sense of frustration and sadness, Lapid is one of the few artists from the Zionist nation willing to unspool the darkness at its center. With his latest, Yes, Lapid, whose work has always been far more nuanced than simply “angry,” presents Israel as it is: a nation committing a continuous genocide, and gleeful to do so. Any rage one could describe his previous films with is gone, replaced instead by an exhausted revulsion. There’s no question about whether what’s happening is a genocide. There’s no debate to be had because the debate ended long before this current wave of death, and Lapid isn’t interested in litigating something that’s common sense. He’s holding a mirror up to his people and reflecting every depravity, dismissal of the truth, and banal act of life on the other side of the border.
Following Y, a submissive musician who says “Yes” to any request, Yes is the logical endpoint of bootlicking. In the aftermath of October 7, Y is contracted by a Russian billionaire and the Israeli government to write a new national anthem. As he descends into further degradation, we see and hear glimpses of the genocide just miles away. Radio broadcasts announcing a death toll are quickly dismissed, the sounds of bombs dropping are ignored by loud raves. It’s only when Y drifts closer to the border, looking for inspiration, that some sense of morality seeps in. In a standout moment, Y being relayed supposed atrocities committed by Palestinians by a former flame, doubt crosses his face. As she becomes angrier and angrier, Y’s resolve doesn’t deepen, it cracks. For all its wild satire, Lapid plays this moment with devastating sincerity. She believes she’s laying out the exact reason that this isn’t a genocide but a defense, but the longer she goes, the more it sinks in that there’s a sick joy in the destruction of a people. Painted as “revenge,” it gives those who do it a sense of nationalist pride. For Y, a man whose bottom has long since fallen out, the only place to go is up, and it’s here that he finally understands the sickness of his country.
This is Yes in a nutshell. A film made by an Israeli dissident, Lapid has been condemned many times over by Israel’s government, trying to shake any semblance of a wake-up to who he hopes are the good Israelis. In 2026, years after this film was conceived and a month into the Iranian War (when we spoke, Israel and the United States had just begun their assault), what does that even mean? Who are the good Israelis? Americans? The answer seems to drift further away each day. Yes doesn’t presume to have the answers; Lapid isn’t a didactic filmmaker. He only seeks to show the perpetrators of a genocide the rot that takes over your soul when you justify, cheer on, or even ignore it. Through an unwieldy, garish nightmare, maybe the way out is through.
As Yes begins to roll out to theaters, I sat down with Nadav Lapid to discuss the film. Our conversation dovetails into what it means to create art in the face of a genocide, if it can even resonate at this point, and the failure of Israeli artists to stand for anything.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Brandon Streussnig: I’ve seen so few films about a genocide that centers the perpetrators as the primary perspective. There’s, of course, The Zone of Interest, but to see this current atrocity so clearly, through the eyes of Israelis, with no hesitation about what’s happening and to whom, is unnerving. Talk to me about coming to that decision.
Nadav Lapid: Yeah, it’s very true. I think first of all, I must say that, for many years, there was a justified feeling that, in many cases, the voice of victims is muted. It’s like the perpetrators are the ones who are writing the histories. In the last decade, we see a little bit of the opposite phenomenon, which is, of course, very positive, that you see many, many pieces of art coming from the point of view or expressing the point of view or making the voice of victims heard. But I think in many, many cases, people forget that if art wants to tell an entire story, the last thing that it should do is to ignore the voice of the perpetrators.
When you come to perpetrators, of course, there’s a huge complexity. First of all, no one, or at least almost no one, is the devil except for the devil himself. Even the worst perpetrators never captured themselves as though they were evil. They had their reasoning, they had their way of thinking, they heard the emotions, and they lived their lives. I think that sometimes people totally confuse this, and I’ve seen reactions like this for years. In a way, it’s much more complex to show the voice of perpetrators than it is to show the universe of victims. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you accept, support, or justify all of this. A movie describing or coming from the point of view of perpetrators always must, I think, swim in a lake of complexity because, on one hand, there is the menace of becoming morally relativist. On the other hand, there is the danger of becoming reductive.
I think that yes, it’s neither one nor the other, but it also demands from the audience this level of complexity because when we talk about the victim, the victim is right. You cannot argue with the sufferer or the victim in a way, but when you talk about the perpetrators… Now, for me in this case, I didn’t really have a choice. I belong to the perpetrators. Of course, it’s a little bit more complicated because the plan was different on the 7th of October. I have neither the capacity nor the ambition, nor is it even my role, to sing a song which is not mine. I have only one song to sing here. Without making a comparison, I try to imagine a movie done by, let’s say, I don’t know, Fritz Lang in ’41. A theoretical movie about a couple living in Munich. I would be extremely fascinated to see this movie. I’m sure that this movie, if it had been done, would’ve shed light on this horror the same way as a theoretical movie done by a prisoner in Auschwitz. So I think that at least at the beginning, we should wish to have this whole complexity, this entire complexity.
BS: To that point, you paint Tel Aviv in a way that I’ve never seen before. When we see it from the point of view of influencers or social media, it’s shown as this paradise. But you present it as it is: a place crumbling under moral rot. I know you left years ago to live in France. What is your perception of Tel Aviv now?
NL: I think Tel Aviv, in this sense, is a very interesting place because when you grow up in Tel Aviv, you grow up with a lot of vanity. The people in Tel Aviv are in a bubble. The idea is that Tel Aviv is a bubble. Tel Aviv is totally detached from the geographical, political, and geopolitical environment that surrounds it. It’s like an extremely liberal city in the middle of a conservative area. It’s Western in the middle of the East, it’s European or American. People who are Tel Aviv natives take pride in the fact that it’s a mini New York, or a mini Paris, or a mini Berlin, or a mini London, but it’s even more festive. You never party as you party in Tel Aviv. The capacity of the people of Tel Aviv to party, even in the middle of a war. A missile is falling, and two hours later, there’s a huge trance party in exactly the same spot.
I think there’s a moment when you understand that… Again, I’m not trying to make a moral judgment, but it’s a part of the way of life to normalize what shouldn’t be normal, to be normal in the middle of an abnormal state of things. There’s a lot of obscenity and blindness inside it. It’s not a solution; maybe it’s a problem. I think that for many years, when you grow up in Tel Aviv, you feel that you are the solution, that you are the example. If everyone had been like you, things would be different.
You feel it in a very physical way, in a very visceral way, when thinking about the fact that Tel Aviv is a one-hour drive from Gaza, which is like New York and New Jersey. Imagine that there is a genocide in New Jersey, and you keep on going to Angelica every day. So when there are loud and highly brutal bombings in Gaza, you hear it in Tel Aviv, you hear the sound in Tel Aviv when you sit in a bar. I think that the movie, in this sense, is aimed at the good Israelis, not the bad ones. In the heart of the movie, you see the good Israelis, at least in their own eyes, liberal, modern, funny, sexy, etc., who don’t share the same values as the settlers or extremely religious people. But, at the end of the day, they haven’t done anything or have collaborated with the genocide in some way. I think it’s a reflection of those who see themselves as good people.
BS: Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Who are the good Israelis, in your mind? I know that’s a big question, and maybe you can only speak for yourself, but what more could the people who see themselves as “good” be doing?
NL: I can, for instance, try to think about my share because I’m a filmmaker. What should Israeli filmmakers do? Today’s Israeli filmmakers talk very often about the boycott and the extent to which the boycott is “unfair.” A lot of them, a lot of us are doing political films and pay the price and take risks. It’s a very complicated question, but I feel that we hardly talk about our share. So I would divide it into two. First of all, I think that if someone from the Moon carefully watched Israeli films with attention, mainly fiction films from the last 10, 15 years, I think that you wouldn’t find inside most of them the profile, the portrait of this society that committed this horror with a very slight and meaningless resistance and opposition.
The second thing, during the war, for instance, Israeli TV channels were broadcasting propaganda disguised as news and consciously avoided showing Israeli’s images from Gaza. So in a way, the only people who weren’t exposed to the horror of Gaza were the ones who were committing it. I think that we filmmakers could have and should have tried to create an audiovisual alternative. This is our tool, at least to create them, but we didn’t. So I think we failed. We failed in the end. Between being an Israeli artist… I belong to this community, and between being an artist and Israeli, we were much more Israelis than we were artists. We’re like everyone else, and we felt the same moral abyss, I think.
BS: I know it’s exaggerated in the film, but there’s still so much truth to the things Y is saying “Yes” to when asked. Is this something you’ve struggled with as an Israeli filmmaker? The impulse to say “Yes” to those forces?
NL: Yeah, I struggle with the impulse to say “Yes.” I also struggle with this feeling that I think is very human in the end, that in a reality where resistance, A) looks totally inefficient. Sometimes it looks like an ant defying, challenging, a horde of elephants. It looks pathetic. B) it poisons your soul in the long-term. It poisons your soul. It looks almost archaic. And C) there is this design thing that we all share at a certain point to belong, to be part of something, to love, and to be loved. So this is the thing I’m very often dealing with inside myself because this process, when you replace the “No” with “Maybe,” then the “Maybe” with “Why not,” and the “Why not” with “Yes” — I can totally relate to it. Villains, they don’t come with labels on their heads, and we all normalize catastrophe. In a certain way, we all kiss in front of burning Gazas like the people in the film.
BS: Your work is often described as angry, and I find that limiting. There’s an odd sense of moving hope, especially in Yes. There’s also so much humor within. Where are you these days? Where’s your head?
NL: First of all, I totally agree that I think that there is a sense of exaggeration in this anger thing or rage thing. I don’t know. I think that it’s a little bit reductive toward my films. I think that my films try to have many layers. This act of having layers, it’s in a way a little bit opposite to rage or anger, which is a kind of impulsion. I think that my movies are also very romantic. Not romantic in the sense of love, but romantic in a kind of view of this quest for redemption. There’s a quest for truth. So many movies are very ironic or cynical.
My movies are not cynical and they’re not even ironic in the end. There is irony inside it, but this irony is actually disguising a despair. So I totally agree. Where am I today? In what sense? I can give a kind of general answer saying that I think that, in my opinion, what’s happening around us is becoming more and more relevant. Everything that was said about Israel should also be said today about the U.S. But no one speaks about this. So, in what sense, where am I today?
BS: Your state of mind.
NL: I feel pretty far from anger because there’s something reductive about anger. When you’re angry about someone, you put yourself in a kind of superior position. I think that I’m extremely agitated about a lot of things that look to me terrible, but I can totally, totally understand them.
Comments are closed.