“For years, I’ve dreamed of liberating myself from this Israeli prison,” says Paris-based Israeli director Nadav Lapid. The award-winning filmmaker—who is no fan of his home country’s government—considered making his latest blistering satire in the US. After all, he says, “if you think about a society addicted to money and power, worshipping brutality and vulgarity and sinking to totalitarianism, this is also a description of the US. So maybe we shoot in LA or New York. And we played with names like Joaquin Phoenix as the main character.”
That was in October of 2023. Then came the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, which catalyzed the ongoing war in Gaza—leading Lapid back to the homeland he decries and, in spite of himself, can’t let go.
The resulting film, Yes—opening this week in New York City—begins with an orgiastic carnival among warmongers in Tel Aviv. The movie’s second half travels to the Gaza border for a series of excoriating, excruciating monologues with the literal fog of war as background. While Lapid’s four previous features, including Synonyms (winner of Berlin’s Golden Bear) and Ahed’s Knee (winner of Cannes’s Jury Prize), explored the push-pull of Israeli identity, Yes sets that question ablaze. It’s a frantic two and a half hour expression of fury in which an artist tamps down his conscience to suckle at the teat of nationalism, rationalizing that the pot of gold at the end represents freedom—if not for him, at least for his family. (There are also more references to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than you may expect; Raphael is Lapid’s favorite.)
The movie is dark and depressing, but also funny and flamboyant—a dance on a volcano, as Lapid describes it, with lavishly choreographed sequences and unpredictable fantasy elements that shatter reality to reveal a deeper truth. As I’m sure you can imagine, it has not been embraced by the current Israeli government. At the same time, Yes has faced obstacles elsewhere due to its country of origin; it was notably not included in the main competition at Cannes 2025, and had trouble finding an international distributor.
Lapid understands these contradictions—but as you might expect if you’ve seen his work, he also rebukes critics from all sides. He is someone who has used the term “genocide” in other interviews to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, but Yes is also not shy about reminding its viewers of Hamas’s atrocities in descriptive (though not visual) detail. The title is binary; the work is not. “When things that are unimaginable become daily routine, only the excessive, only the insane can touch the truth,” he says. “A modest, humble, and honest loyalty to realism might miss [when representing] a society in a super fast deterioration toward moral abyss.” Our conversation below has been edited for clarity.
Hugo Selignac, Judith Lou Levy, Nadav Lapid and Antoine Lafon attend the Yes photocall at UGC Cine Cite des Halles on September 12, 2025 in Paris. Marc Piasecki/Getty Images.
Vanity Fair: I understand you had a script for Yes and were already in preproduction before the Oct. 7 attacks.
Nadav Lapid: We had the main cast and were halfway to the financing, which was easy to find before and impossible to find after.
Yet the film opens with logos from many production entities, including the Israel Film Fund and the Ministry of Culture and Sports. That department has not been your biggest supporter in the past. How did this alignment happen?
The question is good, and the answer is boring. People imagine the Israel Film Fund, and they imagine Netanyahu’s secretary reading scripts. It’s an office in Tel Aviv. The head is a cinephile; she has a small committee, and they liked my work. [The Fund] is no one from the Israel that we have in mind—the fascistic, authoritarian, militarist Israel. No one who works for the state was aware of the film before its premiere at Cannes. And since then, they have attacked it several times.
Now there has been a shift. The Minister of Culture has already forced reforms that would make films like mine impossible. He said something like I offended our pure and sanctified soldiers, and he gave a solemn oath that so long as he is there, I won’t get one penny more.
There is an irony to this, which plays into the binary nature of the film’s title: Many who support Palestinians will boycott your film because it got money from the Fund. And even if you did work exclusively with French money, they may still boycott you, as an Israeli.
I think people who wouldn’t watch the film because of the logo of the Israel Film Fund wouldn’t have watched the film without that logo. They wouldn’t watch because it is Israeli, because I am Israeli, and they’re unable to deal with complexity. And they should be sincere enough to admit it to themselves. I think that they’re incapable of accepting the fact that maybe the most radical movie about this topic is done by an Israeli.
Art should always be free and strange and surprising. Art should always put us in a conflict with ourselves. In their head, since I’m Israeli and since the film takes place in Tel Aviv, it’s done from inside the Israeli universe, and there’s already something that isn’t legitimate. And if they would have watched the movie, they would have had to deal with the fact that despite all of this, the movie goes very far in content and form. They prefer to make the easy choice, which is ignoring anything that might harm their sterile and hermetic concept of the world. Especially those who live in Western society.
When they march in Geneva, London, Paris or New York shouting “free Palestine”—which is very good—they don’t consider the fact that they talk from a certain place. An American student in Boston is in a very safe place to talk about this. People who come from such safe places should think not twice, but twenty times before they give moral lessons to people who take risks.
Have you been back to Israel since shooting this film?
I was there for the release of the film. There are 30,000 negative things that can be said, and should be said, about Israel. I think that I’m saying more than half of them. But Israel is not Iran, and it is not China. It doesn’t mean that it’s better, but it’s different. No one threw me into prison. When I go there, it is tense; sometimes people react with a lot of fury. I get endless menacing messages, “now we’ll kill you.” But I never really felt threatened there. A big number of the Israeli film technicians and actors refused to participate.
A scene from Yes. Courtesy of Kino Lorber
Were there some walkouts during production?
Very few people walked off, but many refused before we began. We could not find one makeup artist; our makeup artist came from Belgrade. We made the film under the radar, especially when shooting very close to Gaza. The scene on Love Hill [a spot that overlooks Gaza] was done without authorization, of course.
How close was that sequence to actual fighting?
We were 500 or 600 meters from the border. It was a closed military zone. Officially, and I guess maybe it was true, there was the possibility of a gun shooting or missile shooting from Gaza.
What was the vibe like on set that day?
It was the fourth day of our trip to Gaza, following the trip the characters take. Each day the noise of the bombs became louder and the smoke became more visible. Hundreds of explosions in a minute. The whole movie was shot in the middle of this horror. I think at this stage, it was already clear that everyone felt that, in a way, we are doing “the last film.”
The film also has musical numbers and a boot-licking orgy, which I imagine were a lot of fun.
It was like a party, but you dance like the dance floor is a volcano—or the dance floor is the dead bodies. All those scenes end on a terrible note. When you shoot in a country that is committing a horror like Israel is committing in Gaza, there is a kind of terrible energy. A kind of a morbid vivacity. A blood-freezing smile on everyone’s face. This is the difference between a movie that is shot while things are taking place and something shot retrospectively, where you say it was so terrible. While it is happening, there is the energy. The energy is terrible but electric. Endless vibration, endless earthquake.
What percentage of the Israeli population do you think agrees with you about all this?
Maybe 0.5 percent, and let’s say that at least half of them don’t live in Israel anymore. Luckily, my movies are smarter than myself. I could write an article in [left-wing Israeli newspaper] Haaretz describing my point of view, and 0.5 percent of Israelis would agree with it. But this is not an article. The movie can talk in many ways to people, some of whom disagree with many of my ideas.
We just had the Oscars. Is this something you follow?
I don’t usually care so much about the Oscars.
But you’ve benefited from the competitive aspect of festivals—Synonyms won at Berlin, and Ahed’s Knee won an award at Cannes. If a film of yours was in the Oscar race, would you give it the full campaign?
I guess. I am a super competitive person. It gives me fuel. When I make a movie I invent enemies in my head that I need to beat.
I’ve learned a lesson with Yes, which I think is my best film, but it was not even in the main competition in Cannes. It’s rare that these competitions [are a benefit for] something that is “out of order,” for things that go beyond. When you think about the people who revolutionized cinema—Godard, Lynch, Pasolini, Fassbinder—they did not win Palmes D’Or or Oscars. [David Lynch did in fact win the Palme D’Or and an Honorary Oscar, and Godard won an Honorary Oscar and Special Palme D’Or.] There is a clash between art and institutions.
Yes has a melancholy sequence where the main character rhapsodizes about giving up and saying “yes” to all that is simple about life. He’s at the beach, noticing its beauty. What, if anything, do you still love about Israel?
The water of the Mediterranean when you don’t see anything else, when you see only the water. And the fact that you can dry laundry so quickly.
Before shooting I felt a huge fascination for every street corner in Tel Aviv. Everything fascinated me. Some streets and some corners in Tel Aviv will forever and ever be my only motherland. My one and only hometown.
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