CANNES: Director Nadav Lapid said his new film Yes about a musician asked to re-write the Israeli national anthem is a response to his country’s “blindness” to suffering in Gaza.

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 Israel on Oct 7, 2023.

“Blindness in Israel is unfortunately a fairly collective illness,” the 50-year-old director said 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.

“What happened on Oct 7, the level of horror and cruelty, pushed everything to a biblical scale,” he said. “The great Israeli fantasy... of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone has become a political programme.”

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”.

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.

Lapid said he had to overcome numerous obs­tacles before starting the film, which was carried out in “guerrilla mode” as the Israeli offensive 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 coonflict, said the director.

Yes also refers to the only answer artists are allowed to give in Israel when asked about their support for the conflict, according to lead actor Ariel Bronz.

Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2025