Nadav Lapid's 'Yes' Is Israel's Most Controversial Film
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- Nadav Lapid directed "Yes," set and filmed in Tel Aviv, which both hard-right and far-left Israeli factions have denounced; the film also received multiple nominations from Israel's version of the Oscars.
- The plot follows Y. (Ariel Bronz), a pianist, and his dancer partner Yasmine (Efrat Dor), who are offered a commission by a Russian oligarch (Aleksy Serebryakov) to write "a new anthem for a new Israel… an anthem for the victory generation."
- The film confronts October 7, 2023 and the Gaza war directly: a character translates witness accounts, characters speak explicitly about Gaza, smoke appears on the horizon, and a PR guru character whose head becomes a video screen broadcasts atrocity imagery the audience never sees.
- Lapid originally planned to set the story in America and cast Joaquin Phoenix in the lead, noting the corruption-and-power critique could apply to "any major metropolis" — he was "joking. Possibly."
- International distributors praised Lapid the filmmaker but treated the film itself "like it was radioactive," reflecting commercial reluctance to handle the politically charged material.
- The review characterizes "Yes" as ultimately a horror movie, not the comedy its opening Bacchanalia suggests, posing a binary: "Can you ignore what's done in your name? Yes or no."
Why it matters: Lapid's 'Yes' crystallizes a question Israeli society can't resolve: whether art that names October 7 and the Gaza war can exist without being consumed by the conflict. The film earned Israeli Oscar nominations but drew denunciation from both political poles, while international distributors treated it as 'radioactive' — a narrow path for provocative Israeli cinema.
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