CHOSEN LAND
SOME OF WORLD CINEMA’S MOST CELEBRATED FILMMAKERS HAVE TUMULTUOUS TIES WITH THEIR HOMELANDS, AND ISRAEL’S NADAV LAPID – WHO HAS MADE THREE FEATURES TO DATE, INCLUDING 2019 GOLDEN BEAR WINNER SYNONYMS – IS NO DIFFERENT. IN CONVERSATION WITH THE WRITER/DIRECTOR, ANTHONY CAREW EXAMINES HOW THIS RELATIONSHIP MANIFESTS IN OPPOSITIONS BETWEEN ARTISTRY AND AGGRESSION, OPULENCE AND OPPRESSION, PATRIOTISM AND PROTEST. ‘It’s not important if you love your country or you hate your country,’ says Nadav Lapid. ‘It’s more important who you are.’
This is a simple, almost banal koan, but, for the filmmaker, it’s loaded with meaning. As an Israeli native (born, in 1975, in Tel Aviv), Lapid has a conflicted relationship with his homeland, the contradictory feelings greeting him every morning. When he wakes up in Tel Aviv, he opens the window, sees the blue skies, the trees, the birds, and feels at home. Then he opens the newspaper, and all those good feelings suddenly vanish. ‘Israel is ill,’ Lapid diagnoses, coldly. ‘It’s a very sick society. A lot of us recognise that this is the case, but it’s hard to recognise any possible remedy. Israel is my society, so I feel like we share the same disease.’
Running with the metaphor, Lapid offers that ‘the political and the psychological have combined to create a cancer in the collective soul’. The root causes, he suggests, are the forces of globalism, nationalism, Zionism: ‘This feeling of being the “chosen people” or “chosen nation”, it was never really based on something, but today it is definitely based on nothing. There is nothing special here. It doesn’t feel virtuous to live here.’ He laments that the contemporary dialogue, in politics and media, doesn’t allow for ‘any form of complex view or dialectical argument’. Which is, of course, where his films come in.
At first blush, there’s nothing linking his three features. Policeman (2011) delivers a bifurcated narrative that looks at two groups who eventually collide: a squad of counterterrorism officers and a motley crew of would-be revolutionaries. The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) – a film remade in 2018 by Sara Colangelo as a high-profile American indie – tells the story of its titular character, who becomes obsessed with a five-year-old student she believes to be
