Yes review – a fierce satire of Israel's ruling classes, radioactive with political pain
It is inspired by the activist group Civic Front, which after 7 October released a new version of Haim Gouri's classic song Hareut, or Fellowship, with jarring new lyrics calling for wholesale extermination in Gaza. A fictional version of this song features here, with lyrics about attacking the bearers of the swastika (as in the original) but also presents its audience with slick equivalence: the 'Nazi' gotcha-comparison is levelled at Israel in a way that it isn't at other countries. There is an odious Russian fintech bro here, commissioning jingoistic, nationalistic music; the suggested equivalence between Putin and Israel is presented without subtlety, although subtlety is maybe beside the point. One fourth-wall breaking scene has one man list the people who are supposedly anti-Israel: the BBC, CNN, the New York Times – and then turn furiously and directly to the camera: '… and you too are anti-Israel!'
Y (Ariel Bronz) is a musician and composer married to Yasmin (Efrat Dor) whose family's money and connections promise a comfortable future for them both and their year-old baby in Tel Aviv. They are enjoying an almost frantic high life of partying, booze and drugs, amid people who want to affirm their reality, to show the world and each other that they are not to be cowed by terrorism and by those who want what they wanted before 7 October – an end to the state of Israel.
But Y is traumatised by the recent death of his mother and the reality of the family's cramped conditions in a tiny flat. He composes a new, aggressively anti-Gaza song, apparently with the patronage of a wealthy Russian (played by Aleksei Serebyakov) and, brought to the edge of some profound emotional breakdown by the strain of processing the agony of 7 October and – perhaps – by the suspicion that the response is futile vengeance, Y abandons his family and heads off to reconnect with his old lover Leah (Naama Preis). Leah, a translator with access to restricted official documents, can give him the authentic details about the 7 October atrocity – details that Y simultaneously fears and demands. And he is seized with a desire to scream his poem, cruelly or cathartically, from Golani Hill, otherwise known as the Hill of Love, which overlooks Gaza City itself.
As before with Lapid, there are brilliant, showy set-pieces: the opening party scene is a marvel of extremity and nightmarish jaded sensuality. The point is evidently to suggest their heartlessness and solipsism – although this approach is not as powerful as the more plausibly real scenes showing Y with Leah. As one character says: 'You are devastated by what it is to live in Gaza, but you don't know what it is to be Israeli.' It is a paradox within which this film lives.
Yes screened at the Cannes film festival.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
7 hours ago
- Telegraph
Gal Gadot blames anti-Israel sentiment for Snow White's £84m loss
Gal Gadot has partly blamed anti-Israel sentiment for the £84m flop of Disney's remake of Snow White. The film, released in March this year, was a live-action remake of the original 1937 feature-length cartoon made by Walt Disney. It was marred by controversy after Rachel Zegler, the film's lead actor, said on social media she has been 'public with a pro-Palestine stance since 2021'. Israeli Gadot, 40, who was cast as the evil stepmother, has now broken her silence about why she thought the film failed. Speaking to Israeli TV station Keshet 12's The A Talks programme, she said: 'I was sure this movie was going to be a huge hit. 'And then October 7 happened. What's happening in all kinds of industries, and also in Hollywood, is that there's a lot of pressure on celebrities to speak out against Israel.' Zegler, 23, was criticised after she shared the trailer for the studio's live-action remake online last summer, with the comment: 'And always remember, free Palestine.' The New York Times said Mark Platt, the film's lead producer, flew to Los Angeles to have a 'heart-to-heart' with Zegler after her post caused a 'severe rift' with Gadot, it was reported at the time. While Gadot stayed silent on the issue at the time, she has now said: 'I can always explain and try to give context about what's happening here, and I always do that. But in the end, people make their own decisions. And I was disappointed the movie was so affected and it didn't succeed at the box office. But that's how it goes.' Posting on her Instagram account on Sunday, Gadot added: 'Of course, the film didn't fail solely because of external pressures. There are many factors that determine why a film succeeds or fails and success is never guaranteed.' Among the films controversies was a flip-flop decisions about casting actual dwarves or CGI representations. Bringing in Zegler as Snow White was also criticised because she is not white, despite the original German fairytale describing the character's 'skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony'. Disney scaled back a lavish Hollywood premiere and cancelled planned interviews with the media following the fallout. Talking about her role, Zegler also suggested her character was a feminist, prompting commentators to criticise the actress for trying to make the beloved fairytale into a 'woke' retelling. Zegler also suggested the feature film was based on a different version of the 1812 Brothers Grimm fairytale. She said David Hand's 1937 original animated film was 'extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power' and admitted she has only seen it once. 'The original cartoon came out in 1937, and very evidently so,' she told Extra TV in 2022. 'There's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird. So we didn't do that this time.'
Sky News
7 hours ago
- Sky News
'Not in our name': Israelis protest against Gaza war - but Netanyahu seems unmoved
The coordinates came through last minute. The instruction was to get there fast. People organising demonstrations, blocking motorways and major intersections, did not want police getting wind of their plans. The one we found ourselves at, near the town of Lod, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, felt a bit like a flash-mob protest, done and dusted in less than half an hour. The protestors had set fire to tyres, which blazed across the motorway, filling the sky with thick black smoke. They waved the Israeli flag and other yellow flags to show solidarity with the remaining hostages still in Gaza, whose photos they carried - their faces and names seared on the collective consciousness now - a collective trauma. "We want the war to end, we want our hostages back, we want our soldiers back safe home, and we want the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to end", one of the protestors told me. "We do not want to have these crimes made in our name." And then she was gone, off to the next location as the group vanished in a matter of minutes, leaving police to put out the fire. This was a day of stoppage, a nationwide strike - a change of tactics by the hostage families to up the ante with the government in their calls to stop the war, make a deal and bring the hostages home. Benjamin Netanyahu was unmoved. "Those who are calling for an end to the war today without defeating Hamas are not only hardening Hamas's stance and delaying the release of our hostages, they are also ensuring that the horrors of October 7 will recur again and again", he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. Netanyahu 'broke contract' with us Ahead of the day of strike action, we spoke to a former Air Force reservist who quit in April in protest over Netanyahu's decision to break the ceasefire. "I felt he hadn't broken the contract with Hamas, he'd broken the contract with us - with the people, releasing the hostages, stopping the war. That was my breaking point." He wanted to be anonymous, identifying himself by the call sign 'F'. He had done three tours since the war began, mostly spent with eyes on Gaza - coordinating air strikes to support ground operations and ensuring the Air Force gets the target right. 2:55 'This is eternal war' "It's very complicated, very demanding and very hectic. The main problem is to see that you follow the rules and there are lots of rules - safety rules, international law rules, military doctrine rules. "And to see that there are no mistakes because you can check all the rules, you can make everything perfect, if there's a mistake, it bypasses everything you did and the bomb would fall on someone you didn't want it to fall on." I ask him how he feels about the huge death toll in Gaza. "Look, the uninvolved death toll is tough. It's tough personally, it's tough emotionally, it's tough professionally. It shouldn't happen. "When you conduct a war at this scale, it will happen. It will happen because of mistakes, because of the chaos of war." 1:05 He is softly spoken, considered and thoughtful, but says he's prepared to take part in the more radical protest actions, such as blocking motorways and starting fires, to try and get the message through. "Hamas is probably the weakest enemy we have had since 1948," he says. "In '48, in the liberation of Israel, we fought seven armies, much better equipped, better ordered than us, and the war took less time. "We stopped the war with Iran after 12 days. They are much more dangerous than Hamas. We stopped a war with Hezbollah in a couple of months, and they are still a much bigger threat than Hamas.
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Ex-Israeli intelligence chief said 50 Palestinians must die for every 7 October victim
The Israeli general who headed military intelligence on 7 October 2023 has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day and 'it does not matter now if they are children', in recordings broadcast by Israel's Channel 12 TV station. Aharon Haliva said the toll in Gaza, which he put at more than 50,000 dead, was 'necessary' as a 'message to future generations' of Palestinians. 'They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price,' he added, referring to the mass expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands after the creation of Israel in 1948. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic. Much of Israel's leadership and media has used genocidal rhetoric about Palestinians since Hamas's 7 October attacks, including describing them as 'human animals', saying there are 'no innocents' in Gaza and calling for Gaza's total destruction and its ethnic cleansing. However, Haliva's description of a campaign of mass killing including children was an unusually direct description of collective punishment of civilians, which is illegal under international law. Haliva, who stepped down from his position in April 2024, also appeared to endorse the casualty figures compiled by health authorities in Gaza, which Israeli officials regularly attack as propaganda. They have proved reliable in past conflicts. Channel 12 said the undated conversations were recorded 'in recent months'. The Gaza health ministry's toll for those killed by Israeli attacks passed 50,000 in March and has recently climbed above 60,000. Israel's most recent published data on the war put the number of militants killed at about 20,000, so Haliva would have been aware that even by his country's own count most of the Palestinians killed were civilians. 'The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations,' he said in the broadcast comments. 'For everything that happened on October 7th, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn't matter now if they are children.' About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led cross-border attacks, the majority of them civilians, and 250 were taken hostage to Gaza. Channel 12 did not clarify how it had obtained the recordings or who Haliva was speaking with. Israel's Haaretz newspaper described the recordings as a format that allowed the retired officer to 'give an interview … without actually being interviewed'. Haliva's comments about mass killings of Palestinian civilians did not make headlines in other mainstream Israeli outlets. They focused instead on his criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and warnings of systemic failures in security and intelligence. That coverage highlighted the vast gulf between how the war is perceived and discussed inside Israel's borders and beyond them. Among Israelis, Haliva is widely seen as a centrist critic of the current government and its far-right ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, as the general himself noted in the broadcast comments. He quoted an internal critic at the intelligence directorate telling him it was 'lucky' that many of those killed and kidnapped on 7 October 2023 were leftwing Israelis linked to peace movements. 'He told me: 'If this had happened to us, the right, you wouldn't have gone to war like this,'' Haliva said. 'That's what people believe here.' Quique Kierszenbaum contributed to this report
