‘Yes!’ Director Nadav Lapid Preparing France-Based Follow-Up to Berlin-Winning ‘Synonyms’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Dissident filmmaker Nadav Lapid will shoot his next feature in France, describing the project — still in the earliest stages of development — as a thematic echo of his Paris-set Berlin Golden Bear winner “Synonyms.”
“You could say it’s the guy from ‘Synonyms’ meeting his older self,” Lapid tells Variety. “The young character, Y, encounters the older, exhausted Y of the present. The film explores what it means to live in detachment. I wouldn’t call it optimistic, but it does suggest that even if there’s nowhere to go, there’s still the capacity to move, to leave. As long as there is movement, nothing is entirely hopeless.”
The project will build on Lapid’s ongoing collaborations with French producers Les Films du Bal and Chi-Fou-Mi Productions, while almost certainly proceeding without Israeli institutional support, given the vituperative reactions his recent films have provoked — and, by his own admission, have been designed to provoke. But even in self-imposed exile, Lapid remains locked in a confrontation with one particular Israeli.
“Right now, I’m dealing with the key person in the process — myself,” he says. “This is the most fragile and painful stage of creation. I’m trying to convince myself it could be my greatest film. If I don’t believe there’s that potential, it becomes very hard for me to work at all. So I try to deceive myself into thinking it could be something major.”
Now based in Paris, Lapid says he was hardly surprised by the backlash in Israel to his abrasive, polemical film “Yes!”
“They mostly prefer to ignore it,” he says. “The reception was unsurprising, but agitated. There was even an official video produced by the Minister of Culture. He gathered the shooting crew in his office to make a clip with demagogic editing of some of my interviews, accusing me of trying, in all my films, to offend Israel’s ‘pure and sanctified’ soldiers — while taking Israeli money to spit in their face. And now, he said, that was over; this was the last time I would be allowed.”
Lapid feels stronger, however, by calls to boycott his work abroad.
“I don’t mind the concept,” he says. “Boycotts can be a sad but legitimate political method when nothing else works. What I dislike is political laziness. Some people think that by not releasing ‘Yes!’ in Belgium, they’re helping the Palestinian cause. That’s just lazy. They invent a world where the film is the problem—and they solve it by boycotting. It’s all symbolism, detached from real politics.”
“If you focus only on symbols, you detach yourself from real events,” he continues. “It’s like a child thinking they’ve solved the problem by doing the easiest thing. And I’m not very enthusiastic about moral criticism from people who never put themselves at risk. If you want to boycott, fine — but then go build barricades in front of the Israeli embassy. You can’t intervene only where it’s safe.”
