“Yes” tells the story of a struggling pianist and party entertainer known only as Y who is commissioned to write a new national anthem celebrating genocide in Gaza. (The song borrows from a real one in a video by an Israeli nationalist group.) Lapid’s film is a vision of a traumatized country where life has become a frenzy of orgiastic partying and histrionic self-righteousness. It’s like “The Zone of Interest,” the 2023 film about the banal life of a Nazi family living next to Auschwitz, with Eurovision aesthetics. Though of course, as Lapid has pointed out <https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2026/03/23/film-nadav-lapid-yes-israel-palestine/>, “The Zone of Interest” wasn’t made while the Holocaust was happening. In “Yes,” you can sometimes see and hear the real-world annihilation of Gaza in the distance.
Open letters supporting Lapid have been signed by leading figures in French cinema, as well as by the Palestinian intellectual Elias Sanbar and the actress Natalie Portman. The letter signed by Portman calls Israel a criminal state but argues — I think irrefutably — that its dissident artists should be treated like those from any other rogue regime. “Russian, Israeli and Iranian filmmakers should not be threatened with erasure to atone for crimes committed by governments they often fiercely oppose,” it says. *https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/yes-israel-film-boycott.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/yes-israel-film-boycott.html>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42004): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42004 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119782960/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
