Noted filmmaker Nadav Lapid has said his new film "Yes” about a musician asked to rewrite the Israeli national anthem is a response to his country's "blindness" to suffering in besieged Gaza where Israel has been carrying out genocide since October 2023.
Lapid has previously dissected his country's ills in "Synonyms", which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2019, and "Ahed's Knee" (2021).
In "Yes", he portrays a society buried under its own "dark side" since Hamas raided military sites and settlements in Israel on October 7, 2023.
"Blindness in Israel is unfortunately a fairly collective illness," the 50-year-old director told the AFP news agency at the Cannes festival where "Yes" premiered on Thursday.
Over nearly two and a half hours, it follows a musician named Y, who is commissioned by the authorities to rewrite the Israeli national anthem into a propaganda piece calling for the eradication of Palestinians.
"The great Israeli fantasy... of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone has become a political programme," he said.
He added that "very few people are standing up to say that what is happening in Gaza is unbearable" and that there is "a kind of consensus about the superiority of Israeli lives over Palestinian lives".
Open letter against genocide
In one scene, Y and his wife (Shai Goldman) continue feeding their baby while glancing indifferently at their phones, which display notifications of new deadly airstrikes in Gaza.
In another, a small crowd gathers on a rooftop to dance joyfully to the sound of fighter jets overhead.
On the eve of the Cannes festival, Lapid was among more than 380 film figures, including major Hollywood actors, to sign an open letter condemning the film industry's silence on what it called "genocide" in Gaza.
Lapid said he had to overcome numerous obstacles before starting the film, which was carried out in "guerrilla mode" as the Israeli war in Gaza was under way.
Technicians and actors pulled out, and some backers chose not to get involved.
"I was told people no longer make political films on these subjects. They no longer want films for or against" the war, said the director.
"Yes" also refers to the only answer artists are allowed to give in Israel when asked about their support for the war, according to lead actor Ariel Bronz.
'Society needs a shock'
"Our first duty as artists is not to go where the wind is blowing," said Bronz.
"We need to pay a personal price, and it's a real struggle to survive in this position where you're totally isolated in your own country," he told AFP.
French producers backed the film, and there was also support from an independent Israeli public fund despite its biting tone.
"Yes" will open in European cinemas in September, but no Israeli distributor has so far agreed to screen it.
"If I didn't have inside me the ambition, the hope, the pride, and the fantasy to shake things up, I wouldn't have made it," Lapid added.
"I think society needs a shock, and I hope this film will be one."
The Israeli army has pursued a genocide against Gaza since October 2023, killing nearly 64,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, rejecting international demands for a ceasefire.
The dead include some 11,000 Palestinians feared buried under rubble of annihilated homes.
Experts, however, contend that the actual death toll significantly exceeds what the Gaza authorities have reported, estimating it could be around 200,000.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.
