Israel

Synopsis

The policeman Yaron stands in the centre of a group of elite policeman, belonging to the Israeli anti-terrorist unit. He and his fellow unit members are the weapon; the gun the state is pointing at its opponents, the ‘Arab enemy’. Yaron worships his unit, the male comradery, his muscular body, his beauty. Yaron is excited, his wife is expecting their baby very soon; he could become a father any minute. An encounter with a radical, violent, extraordinary group will confront him with the Israeli class war as well as with the war within his own soul.

Director's Statement

In the 60s and 70s, when political terrorism rose in Western Europe, Israel was socialist, basically egalitarian. Today, Israel has the widest economic gaps in the Western world. Class conflicts are shadowed by the conflict with the common enemy − the Palestinians. But, below the surface, a rage and a feeling of abuse are boiling. In POLICEMAN they mature to an eruption, strangled by a force greater than itself. I tried to create a collision between two groups, each an expression of one of the conflicts − the national and the socio-economical. The routine of the policemen of the elite unit is the clash with the ‘Palestinian enemy’. Their virility and their readiness to fight is the expression of a country in which the sidewalks and coffee houses are filled with men who have fought in wars and killed. They are confronted with a small group of young radicals. They kidnap three Israeli billionaires during the wedding of the daughter of one of them. They are ready to kill or to be killed in order to free society from the oppression the majority sees as a normal life. Members of both groups share a combination of great naivety and great violence. Both of them lack complexity outlook and dialectic view. They are prisoners of their own values, of their own truth, of their own moral system, of their own existence. Ignoring the existence of the other enables the violence towards the other − physical violence in the policemen, rational violence in the revolutionaries.
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Cast & Crew

Directed by: Nadav Lapid

Written by: Nadav Lapid

Produced by: Itai Tamir

Cinematography: Shai Goldman

Editing: Avi Fahima

Production Design: Avi Fahima

Cast: Michael Aloni (Natanel), Menashe Noy (Michael), Michael Mushonov (Oded), Yiftach Klein (Yaron), Yaara Pelzig (Shira)

Nominations and Awards

  • Feature Film Selection 2012