Nadiv Lapid’s Battle to Release His Post Oct.7 Israeli Satire ‘Yes.’

“Sometimes I felt like the protagonist of a Jewish joke,” says Nadav Lapid. “The Jews call you an antisemite. And the antisemites call you a Jew.”

For the Israeli director, the bitter punchline has become reality over the past year as he’s fought to release Yes, his delirious, confrontational satire of post-Oct. 7 Israel, a film that has drawn fire from both nationalist hardliners and pro-Palestinian activists.

Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, has condemned Lapid and the film for supposedly disgracing “our pure and sanctified IDF soldiers,” Lapid notes. Others have criticized the director for taking Israeli state money — Yes was partially financed by the Israeli Film Fund — making him, in their eyes, complicit.

“The movie has evoked anger from the right-wing Jewish community and from people who define themselves as left wing,” Lapid says. “Some don’t know how to deal with the fact that such a blunt movie about the human phenomenon which brought about the genocide in Gaza was directed by an Israeli. I got emails: You are worse than Goebbels. You’re a collaborator with a genocide. … The film confuses people, and not everyone wants to be confused.”

That tension — between resistance and complicity — has defined Lapid’s work. His career has been spent interrogating his own Israeli identity and the role of art in the face of state power. His breakout, Synonyms (2019), which won Berlin’s Golden Bear, follows an Israeli soldier who flees to Paris to escape a legacy of rabid nationalism. Ahed’s Knee (2021), winner of Cannes’ Jury Prize, centers on a filmmaker confronting censorship and political coercion in a remote desert town.

“I felt I had become a director of ‘no’ movies,” says Lapid. “My protagonists were always shouting ‘No!’ and running into closed doors. But there comes a moment, psychologically, when you want to say ‘Yes,’ you want to be ‘good.’ But what does it mean to be good in a bad world?”

That shift — from refusal to submission — becomes the engine of Yes.

The film follows Y., a jazz musician (Ariel Bronz), and his wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor), a dancer, who, out of financial need and ethical exhaustion, surrender to Israel’s social, political and military elite. After years of resistance, they decide to submit — to say yes.

Lapid renders that surrender in grotesque, hypersexualized spectacle. At a bacchanalian house party for IDF elites, Y. performs a frenzied routine — fellating a baguette, then facing off in a dance battle with military generals as La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” blasts. Later, the couple literally lick the boots of a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov of Anora fame).

Y. is eventually commissioned to compose a new national anthem — an update of a classic Hebrew song with lyrics calling for the destruction of Gaza: “In one year there will be nothing left living there …We’ll annihilate them all.”

The song is not parody. It is taken word-for-word from a real composition by the anti-Palestinian activist group Civic Front. In the film’s closing scenes, Lapid juxtaposes it with footage of children singing the lyrics in a staged music video.

Lapid began working on Yes before Oct. 7, 2023 but rewrote it in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage.

Returning from France to Israel, he found an artistic community mobilized in response. “They were directing, editing, shooting films showing the atrocities of Hamas,” he recalls. “Pop singers went to sing for the soldiers. They were shocked by the attack and convinced they were working to heal an injured society. But on top of everything was written, like in huge red letters: ‘Revenge.’ ‘Vengeance.’”

That reality — and the scale of Israel’s military response, with figures published by medical journal The Lancet last month estimating more than 75,000 killed in Gaza — intrudes directly into Yes. Push notifications of the dead flash across Y.’s phone; he swipes them away. Later, seeking inspiration, he travels to the border and climbs Golani Hill — the so-called Hill of Love — overlooking Gaza, a landscape of rubble beneath a cloud of black smoke.

Making the film proved as fraught as its subject.

“Dozens” of Israeli technicians refused to work on it, Lapid says. “And the actors were afraid.” Securing insurance to shoot near the Gaza border amid ongoing strikes was “a huge problem.” Days before filming began, a missile attack hit Tel Aviv. Members of the French crew, just flown in from Paris, spent hours sheltering in municipal bunkers.

International backers were equally hesitant. “A lot of important French financiers said: ‘In this conflict, we don’t take sides, we prefer to stay objective,’” Lapid says. “You know the line of Godard’s about being objective about the Holocaust? Give five minutes for the Jews and five minutes for Hitler.”

When Yes premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, it drew critical acclaim — but struggled to secure distribution.

“Distributors would email me telling me how much they love and admire the movie, but also why they are afraid to release it,” Lapid says. “At one festival, a major European distributor insisted we meet somewhere discreet, so people wouldn’t see us together. Like I was a forbidden lover.”

The reaction, he adds, was often fiercest among those who hadn’t seen it. “The biggest amount of rage came from people who refused to watch the movie.”

The film’s screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival prompted calls from government officials to remove it from the program for “opening the wounds of Israeli society.” It went on to receive seven Ophir Award nominations, Israel’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, including for best picture and best director.

In August, New York-based distributor Kino Lorber acquired North American rights. They’re releasing Yes in U.S. theaters on March 27.

“There’s something refreshing about a distributor which is not afraid,” Lapid says. “Cinema was born in this kind of courage.”

The director believes American audiences will recognize themselves in the film. “This was shot in Israel and on the border with Gaza, but it’s really also a movie about the American state of mind,” he says. “Each and every American can relate to the possibility — and the impossibility — of saying no to power. What happens when we lower our heads and mumble yes?”

On set, that question played out in real time.

Shooting without authorization near the border with Gaza, Lapid and a skeleton crew were minutes into filming when the army moved in. Then something unexpected happened. A young Israeli officer began asking questions — about cameras, about framing about how a film is made. Hours passed. Instead of shutting them down, he stalled his superiors, buying the production time.

When Lapid approached him for one last shot, the soldier pushed back. “It’s war time. Your shooting is over.” Lapid told him: maybe now war feels like the only thing that matters. One day, it might be film.

The officer hesitated. Then: 10 more minutes.

“From time to time,” Lapid says, “I think — if this guy becomes a filmmaker, what kind of story will he tell? And at the same time … he might be one of the first filmmakers who took part in a genocide.”