From the film’s very first scene, Lapid candidly displays and furiously denounces the militarization and oppressive nationalism of Israeli society. It’s the story of a fortysomething Israeli Jewish filmmaker, identified only as Y (and played by Avshalom Pollak), who flies alongside Israeli soldiers, in a small, shuttle-like plane, to a village in the Negev desert, near the Jordanian border, where he’s presenting one of his films at a local library. A cheerful young woman named Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a native of the village who works for the country’s Ministry of Culture, greets him there. She’s as affable and welcoming as he is grumpy and skeptical, and they quickly bond—dialectically, platonically, over art and politics. He discloses to her, in great detail, the horrors of a seemingly suicidal mission that he had participated in as an Army intelligence officer. She reveals to him her unease with the censorious regulations that her ministry imposes on cultural activities. He unleashes a torrential, seemingly inexhaustible rant about Israel’s government, its ethos, and what he considers the moral and intellectual numbing of the citizenry to the country’s criminal policies—and he plans to publish a damning report about this trip.-
Richard Brody.
Bookmarks