Latest news with #Lapid
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Israeli officials express uncertainty over funding of new Gaza aid mechanisms
Both opposition chair, Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid and Yisrael Beytenu chair, Avigdor Liberman, said Israelis deserve honesty over where tax dollars are going. Israeli officials have expressed uncertainty over the funding for the distribution of aid in Gaza through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, The Jerusalem Post learned Friday. Although no information has been released regarding Israel's and possibly the United States' involvement, there has been speculation over direct Israeli involvement in the funding, notably from opposition leaders. Opposition head MK Yair Lapid questioned the government about the source of funding for two agencies involved during a Knesset plenum debate on Monday. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman claimed that the Mossad and the Defense Ministry are funding the aid distribution in Gaza in a post on X/Twitter on Tuesday. Lapid questioned whether Israel had secretly financed humanitarian aid to Gaza through two shell companies, GHF and the lesser-known Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), established in Switzerland and the US. According to Lapid, Gulf states were expected to fund the aid but declined, citing concerns about the companies' structure. Despite this, $100 million appeared in the organizations' budgets, with GHF's former CEO, Jake Wood, claiming the money came from "a country in western Europe," though no nation has acknowledged it. Wood later resigned, saying the aid plan couldn't fully adhere to humanitarian principles. 'If this money is indeed Israeli and the government is concealing it, it would not only be a deception of Israeli citizens—whose taxes fund it—but also one of the greatest diplomatic blunders in the country's history,' Lapid said. 'If our tax money is already purchasing humanitarian aid, funding food and medicine for children in Gaza, then let's at least gain international recognition for it. For once, let's have global headlines highlighting something positive Israel has done in Gaza.' "Hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of Israeli citizens," Liberman wrote on X. Eliav Breur contributed to this report.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Liberman: Mossad is paying for humanitarian aid to Gaza
Opposition head MK Yair Lapid also questioned the government about the source of funding for aid during a Knesset plenum debate on Monday. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman claimed that the humanitarian aid in Gaza is funded by the Mossad and the Defense Ministry in a post on X/Twitter on Tuesday. "Hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of Israeli citizens," he wrote. Opposition head MK Yair Lapid also questioned the government about the source of funding for two agencies involved in the government's plan to distribute aid in the Gaza Strip, during a Knesset plenum debate on Monday. Lapid questioned whether Israel had secretly financed humanitarian aid to Gaza through two shell companies, Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) and Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), established in Switzerland and the US. According to Lapid, Gulf states were expected to fund the aid but declined, citing concerns about the companies' structure. 'If this money is indeed Israeli and the government is concealing it, it would not only be a deception of Israeli citizens, whose taxes fund it, but also one of the greatest diplomatic blunders in the country's history,' Lapid said. 'Perhaps [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [National Missions Minister Orit] Strock won't like it, and maybe Smotrich fears people finding out he authorized the transfer, but the money has already been sent. This benefits Israeli public diplomacy, strengthens foreign relations, and even aligns with Jewish values,' Lapid said. 'The Israeli government should proudly declare that it funds these two organizations and do what it hates most—take responsibility for its actions and accept the consequences,' the opposition leader concluded. Eliav Breuer contributed to this report.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Yes' Review: Nadav Lapid's Blistering Attack on Israeli Nationalism is an Effectively Blunt Instrument
No one was expecting Nadav Lapid to hold back in his first feature since the events of October 7, 2023: The Israeli filmmaker has long been cinema's most vigorously expressive and outspoken critic of government policy in his birth country, with films like 2019's 'Synonyms' and 2021's 'Ahed's Knee' bristling with fury and shame over Israel's national military culture and artistic censorship. Even with those expectations firmly in place, however, Lapid's new film 'Yes' startles with the sheer, spitting intensity of its rage against the state, projected onto its amoral blank-slate protagonist: a self-abasing musician commissioned to compose a rousing new national anthem, explicitly celebrating the demolition of Palestine. A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it's both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic: as grave as any film with an extended dance break to 2000s novelty hit 'The Ketchup Song' can possibly be. Following 'Ahed's Knee,' which played in competition at Cannes and won the jury prize, the placement of this huge, heaving work outside the festival's official selection — it premiered instead at the tail-end of the Directors' Fortnight sidebar — has raised eyebrows. It's hard not to suspect some level of programming timidity around a film this fragrantly provocative and topically hot, which will likely continue outside the festival sphere. Many arthouse distributors will say no to 'Yes,' a film sure to remain divisive even among audiences who share its politics, given its brash, antic eccentricity of tone and style. But this is not cinema made with the intent of being embraced or awarded by any faction: It's exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment, a filmmaker's immediate, unfiltered response to atrocities too urgent to be addressed with tact or good taste. More from Variety Chilean AIDS Drama 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' Wins Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes Josh O'Connor Art Heist Film 'The Mastermind' Steals 5.5-Minute Cannes Ovation as Director Kelly Reichardt Says 'America Is in a Ditch Right Now' 'Young Mothers' Review: Belgium's Dardenne Brothers Adopt a Wider Focus for Their Most Humane Drama in More Than a Decade Played in ping-ponging modes of morose containment and deranged vitality by a superb Ariel Bronz, our hardly-hero is Y (the same cryptic name, though not the same character, as the protagonist in 'Ahed's Knee'), a pianist and performer introduced in the middle of a frantically choreographed Eurodance production number that sees him variously fellating a baguette, dunking his head into a punch bowl, bobbing for cherry tomatoes in a swimming pool, and extravagantly making out with dance partner Yasmine (Efrat Dor). Turns out she's also his wife, and together they make a living performing this kind of unhinged floor show at private parties for baying Tel Aviv elites. Whether an ensuing dance battle with a horde of Israeli military leaders is officially part of the routine or not, it seems to regularly happen anyway, with Yasmine quietly begging her husband to let them win — before they supplement the night's earnings with some three-way sex work for a frisky elderly client in a cavernous mansion with the taxidermied heads of her relatives mounted on the walls. Welcome to 'The Good Life,' as the film's first chapter is ruefully titled — good for whom, you might ask, though you hardly need to. By day, Y and Yasmine live in a modest city apartment with their baby son, further working as a musician and hip-hop dance instructor respectively. These are hard times for artists, and you take what gigs you can to get by: The title 'Yes' is seemingly a reference to the word that Y, in particular, simply cannot not say, at whatever cost to his integrity and sanity. A particularly hefty offer that he can't — but really, really should — refuse rolls in from a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov, most recently seen to similarly shuddery effect in 'Anora') in bed with the Israeli authorities, who commissions Y to compose the music to a sort of hymn to the post-October 7 era. No standard compilation of patriotic platitudes, the lyrics Y is given to work with amount to barbaric bragging over the sheer scale of carnage the Israeli army has wrought on Gaza in the last 18 months: 'In one year there will be nothing left living there/And we'll return safely to our homes/We'll annihilate them all/And return to plow our fields.' Lapid trades in indelicate satire for indelicate times — Y at one point literally and lavishly licks his wealthy benefactor's gleaming knee-high boots — so these grisly verses at first seem a typically blunt caricature of Israeli nationalism at its most ruthless. But the great, gasp-inducing twist is that these lyrics are not a product of the director's imagination, but taken from a real-world composition by the anti-Palestinian activist group Civic Front. Also real is a climactic music video in which the song is trilled by a choir of cherubic, white-robed children, their faces altered by AI — it might not be state-produced propaganda, but it is indicative of a vicious political climate hard to parody in its excess and extremity. After the drunken, dizzying madness of the first act, the second — titled 'The Path' — arrives as a harsher hangover, as Y, after bleaching his hair and donning unseasonal velvet and snakeskin boots, takes a solo trek into the desert to work on the song. For morbid inspiration, he approaches the Palestinian border, signaled by a grimly hovering duvet of black smoke, and is joined by ex-girlfriend Lea (Naama Preis), an IDF employee who regales him with an exhaustive, vituperative litany of Hamas' crimes against Israel — her own way of rationalizing the panorama of destruction laid out before them. Y, doing his best to maintain apolitical blinkers on both sides, isn't convinced; meanwhile, he has the increasingly repulsed Yasmine and the chiding anti-Zionist voice of his late mother prompting him to wonder if he's said one yes too many. A third act, 'The Night,' sees these conflicting impulses and responsibilities finally come to a head: Y himself may not decide on a clear course of action, but 'Yes' makes brazenly clear its own conviction that silent neutrality is not conscionable or sustainable while the last of Gaza burns. Some may find Lapid's film a hectoring and repetitive statement, but it sets out to be one: Constructed with typical dynamism from the director but hardly as lyrical as 'Synonyms' or as intellectually knotty as 'Ahed's Knee,' this is rhetorical cinema that brooks no possibility of being misheard or misinterpreted. Rather, Lapid encourages all on his side to be at least as loud and strident in protest, to have any chance of being heard over the ongoing din of war. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Daily Express
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Express
Israeli director decries ‘blindness' over Gaza
Published on: Saturday, May 24, 2025 Published on: Sat, May 24, 2025 By: AFP Text Size: Director Nadav Lapid 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 Palestinian militants Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. 'Blindness in Israel is unfortunately a fairly collective illness,' the 50-year-old director told AFP 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 October 7, the level of horror and cruelty, pushed everything to a biblical scale,' he said. Advertisement '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. On the eve of the Cannes festival, Lapid was among more than 380 film figures, including major Hollywood actors, to sign an open letter condemning the film industry's silence on what it called 'genocide' in Gaza. 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 war, said the director. 'Yes' also refers to the only answer artists are allowed to give in Israel when asked about their support for the war, according to lead actor Ariel Bronz. 'Our first duty as artists is not to go where the wind is blowing,' said Bronz, who caused uproar in 2016 by inserting an Israeli flag into his anus during a performance in Tel Aviv. 'We need to pay a personal price and it's a real struggle to survive in this position where you're totally isolated in your own country,' he told AFP. French producers backed the film and there was also support from an independent Israeli public fund despite its biting tone. 'Yes' will open in European cinemas in September, but no Israeli distributor has so far agreed to screen it. 'If I didn't have inside me the ambition, the hope, the pride and the fantasy to shake things up, I wouldn't have made it,' Lapid added. 'I think society needs a shock, and I hope this film will be one.' The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 left 1,218 people dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. A further 251 people were taken hostage. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 53,762 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. * Follow us on our official WhatsApp channel and Telegram for breaking news alerts and key updates! * Do you have access to the Daily Express e-paper and online exclusive news? Check out subscription plans available. Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express's Telegram channel. Daily Express Malaysia
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Yes' Review: Director Nadav Lapid's Decadent Romp Through the Madness and Misery of Post-October 7th Israel
Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid has never shied away from the violence of his homeland, directing a handful of dramas — Policeman, The Kindergarten Teacher, Synonyms and Ahed's Knee — where characters face explosive situations both externally and within, pursued by a relentless camera targeting their every move. His movies are deeply political, but also poetic and personal, eschewing traditional storytelling for an expressionistic approach marked by bravura stylistics, inner turmoil and the occasional musical number. If Ahed's Knee, which came out in 2021, was already a furious cri de coeur against the powers-that-be in Israel, the director's latest feature, Yes (Ken), takes that premise to the next level. Focusing on a young couple, Y. (Ariel Bronz) and Yasmin (Erfat Dor), who sell their bodies and souls to the highest bidders, the film is deliberately in-your-face and outrageously decadent, assaulting the senses as it blatantly depicts acts of physical and psychological self-destruction. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes: Mubi Buys Wagner Moura-Starring 'The Secret Agent' for U.K., India, Most of Latin America 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Eugene Jarecki's Julian Assange Doc Is a Jam-Packed Chronicle of Legal Persecution Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value' Gets 15-Minute Standing Ovation at Cannes Premiere Lapid began writing Yes before the October 7th massacre and subsequent war in Gaza, but the conflict clearly marks the movie from start to finish. Not only does Y., a jazz pianist, hype man and gigolo, agree to compose a new patriotic hymn to accompany the IDF's massive — and still ongoing — attack on Palestinian territory, but certain scenes in the movie were shot with Gaza burning in the background. And while the director does acknowledge the war crimes committed by Hamas, his view of his own country is categorically bleak and condemning: In a regime ruled by violence, zealotry, and tons of money, you can either say yes and survive, or decide to leave such a place behind. It's baffling to see the Israeli Film Fund listed as one of the movie's financers, because Yes is not a work that makes you want to visit the place, unless you're a rich, patriotic cokehead. That description fits the people that Y. and Yasmine subject themselves to during an unsparing first hour filled with hedonistic blowouts and high-priced threesomes, all of them set to thumping techno that will blast your brains out. Both Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty and Boccaccio's The Decameron come to mind as we watch the couple contort their athletic bodies, drown themselves in alcohol and give an older woman what looks like an orgasm in her ear, while they do everything they can to please their wealthy clientele. Lapid goes overboard to make these scenes intolerable, with Shaï Goldman's camera gyrating around like a drunken dancer on the verge of throwing up and production designer Pascale Consigny making sure to put Israeli flags in the background of nearly every location. And yet as much as these moments can be exhausting to sit through, both Y. and Yasmine appear, or at least pretend, to be having a great time, partying hard at night then waking up in a modest Tel Aviv flat to care for their adorable baby boy. They seem to be decent people — young, beautiful and in love, trying to make it in a country that has gone mad. Yasmine is a hip-hop dance teacher, while Y. is a talented musician in need of a big break. When he accepts to write a Zionist ballad paid for by a fanatic Russian oligarch (Alexey Serebryakov), he sells his soul to the devil and barely survives. Toward the end of the movie, we finally get to see a video of that song, and it's an actual clip taken from a propaganda film supporting the IDF, with a chorus of children singing lyrics that praise their nation's military might against the Palestinian enemy. Earlier on, Y. wanders through a delirious street celebration for Israel's Independence Day, passing by hordes of screaming men waving flags and dancing wildly to more thumping techno. Yes may be purposely over-the-top and unsettling to watch — at two and a half hours, it won't win over audiences looking for light arthouse fare — but Lapid is trying to show us that it's hardly an exaggeration of the truth, or at least his own truth about his homeland. He's made an aggressive movie about what he believes to be an aggressive nation, focusing on two Israelis who are searching for either success or an exit plan. Divided into three chapters, the film eveventually tones down in a lengthy middle section, entitled 'The Route,' during which the couple splits apart and Y. heads out of town to work on his song. He crosses paths with Leah (Naama Preis), an old love interest from music school who's now working as an interpreter. The two drive around the desert and make their way toward the Gaza border, leading to a sequence — shot in a single take — that has Leah reciting details of the October 7th atrocities that she translated on behalf of the victims. Later, they venture onto a hillside overlooking Gaza City, which is covered in smoke and resonates with the sound of gunfire and bombings. For all the crazy bacchanalia we witness in Yes (a friend referred to the movie as '120 Days of Shalom'), Lapid doesn't shy away from the suffering of his fellow Israelis, nor to what has happened in the massacre's aftermath. But if the director was already critical of his country beforehand, the place is in such a dire state right now that his only response this time seems to be a form of cinematic self-flagellation. His new movie offers little solace for those hoping the Holy Land will find peace again, and as an exile who's already lived in France for many years, he seems to be turning his back on Israel with an emphatic 'No.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
