Cynical takes on life as an Israeli citizen have been a staple of Nadav Lapid’s filmography long before a PTSD-riddled Tom Mercier tried to abjure his motherland to embrace another in Synonyms (2019). Two years after that fulminating film nabbed a Golden Bear in Berlin comes Ahed’s Knee, a vitriolic tirade on the country’s creeping “loyalty” laws that’s possibly Lapid’s most desperate and lacerating to date. The film follows a Tel Aviv director in his forties who travels to a remote village in Israel’s Arava region for a screening of his latest. The man is Y (Avshalom Pollack) and on arrival he’s greeted by a young officer for the Ministry of Culture, Yahalom (Nur Fibak), who’s there to make sure the Q&A will only touch upon a list of “sanctioned” topics. All of this happened to Lapid too, who traveled to the Arava in 2014 to screen The Kindergarten Teacher, only to be handed a list of government-approved subjects by a civil servant, lest he should get into trouble with the powers that be.
And like Y, Lapid found himself mourning two looming deaths: one of the freedom of speech in his country, and one of his cancer-stricken mother. Longtime collaborators, Era Lapid edited her son’s 2011 feature debut, Policeman, and his sophomore, The Kindergarten Teacher, before passing while working together on Synonyms. She was already sick when Lapid took to the desert in 2014; time and again in Ahed’s Knee, Y flips out his phone to send his dying mother short video dispatches from the trip, harrowing moments that brought me back to the cinema of Chantal Akerman, a family correspondence straddling the domestic and the national that sits between No Home Movie and Là-bas.
Here again in writer-director double duty, Lapid conjures a breathless and dangerous pas de deux. Yahalom’s surprisingly candid assessment of the government’s grip on the arts (“everyone who dissents here is crushed,” she admits early on) triggers a desperate attempt by Y at bringing down the establishment: he wants to secretly tape her confessing the ministry’s dirt and make the recording public. For all the belittling vastness of the desert man and woman amble through, there are times when Ahed’s Knee doubles as a chamber drama, and the exchanges feel claustrophobic, an entrapment amplified by Shai Goldman’s handheld camerawork—extreme and trembling close-ups that mirror Y’s PTSD. It’s an assaultive piece of filmmaking, a film that aims to shake you, and does, throbbing with an omnipresent anguish that finally detonates as Y tells Yahalom about the traumas he suffered during military service, and his role in perpetuating them.
I caught up with Nadav Lapid to discuss the film’s genesis, the many autobiographical references, and whether or not filmmakers can still speak truth to power.
NOTEBOOK: I must confess no other film of yours has ever struck me as so desperate and angry. There’s a sense of urgency I haven’t really sensed anywhere else in your filmography, at least not to this degree...
NADAV LAPID: I think that “urgency” isn’t just the right word here, but the only one that can adequately describe how Ahed’s Knee came to life. Usually, as I guess is the case for most directors, I come up with an idea, and then elaborate it… I take some time to figure out if it works or not, and then I start to write the actual script, which normally takes an average of a year or a year and a half, until I have a draft I can use to look for funding. All along, I send my drafts around to friends so I can get their opinions: You know, the standard process as we know it.
NOTEBOOK: So how was production different this time around?
LAPID: Well, I think that up until the day I started writing the script I had no idea I was actually going to write it. I ended it in two weeks, it was months after the true events that led to this thing taking place. The invitation to give a lecture on The Kindergarten Teacher in the desert. The lady from the Ministry of Culture, who asked me at the end in this very polite and kind and almost sweet way to sign the form. And then again my trip to the desert, the videos I was sending to my agonizing mother, and so on… I started writing two weeks after she passed away, and it took me another two to finish. I wrote half of it—until Y and Yahalom arrive at the theatre for the screening—in a week and a half. The second part of the film, with the army scenes and all, that I wrote in three days. And when I ended it I didn’t know if it was a short film, a medium length film, or what. I remember I talked to a producer. There are seventeen scenes in the film—which is nothing, really. To this day, I’m still surprised the movie ended up taking an hour and 49 minutes.
NOTEBOOK: And yet it doesn’t really have the feeling of an overgrown short, so to speak.
LAPID: Sure, but… very little happens! I mean, a man shows up and talks to a woman. He imagines—or maybe just remembers—things that supposedly happened to him in the past. And then, the next day, he leaves. That’s it. How on earth that should last one hour and 49 minutes, I don’t know. I spent two weeks writing, and then, ten months later, we started shooting. Eighteen days. And then another two months of editing. Everything was so condensed. We prioritized urgency over convenience, so we chose a deadline and stuck to it, which also meant that we were forced to give up other funds we may have gotten if only we’d waited another two or three months. But there was this other thing, too. The movie was talking to me. All the time. I mean, everything was terribly hard but also somewhat easy. I’m no mystic, but the movie kept reaching out to me. We finished the editing in like two months—bear in mind that editing Synonyms took a whole year. I kept asking myself why we spent such little time for this one, whether I’d made too many compromises. So I started, intentionally, to throw in strange ideas, but the film refused to buckle… Everything was there. The film existed. I just had to make it official, to make it.
NOTEBOOK: I remember reading an interview in which you shared a quote by an Italian thinker: “my motherland is the state in which I’m ashamed.” I was thinking about it all through Ahed’s Knee…
LAPID: I think it’s the kind of cruel love that you don’t choose intentionally. When I was doing Ahed’s Knee I think I was so… [pauses]. I felt as though everything was over, and doomed. I felt like I had no drop of ambivalence about nothing, and to me that “nothing” always goes back to Israel. And the moment Synonyms came out, there were people who’d say, “wow, that’s such a strong criticism of Israel, but it’s clear that the main character, the Israeli guy, is still so charming—so it’s full of love!” And I remember listening and thinking, you people have no idea what I’ll be making next! [chuckles] But that’s it. I didn’t want ambivalences. I didn’t want dualities. No kind of love versus hate stuff. But then… I don’t know if that counts as love, exactly, but I feel like my intimacy with Israel sneaked behind my back and found its way into the screen. Take the desert. All through the shoot I’d always tell myself and the actors that the desert was disgusting, the landscape was boring, it didn’t have a single drop of romanticism, of beauty. It’s just filthy sand in that yellowish, boring color. But when I look at the movie now, I think that these tones are there, yes, but there’s also the magisterial presence and identity of the landscape. You can tell yourself what you like, but when you finally take up a camera and start shooting, things reveal themselves to you. Suddenly the woman you’re filming is no longer just a bureaucrat: she has a certain complexion, a smile, certain gestures. And all this hostility, this feeling that everything around me was the enemy, eventually changed into something better.
NOTEBOOK: Another quote that stayed with me, this one uttered by Y himself in the film: “Everyone calls me a young filmmaker, but I feel old.” Does that ring true to you too, at this stage of your career?
LAPID: Yes, yes, yes. I think it was a combination of two things. First of all, Ahed’s Knee was my first film as an adult. My previous films, in a way, were all celebrations of youth. In Policeman you see the crazy virility and naïveté of these young radicals. You have the child in The Kindergarten Teacher. And in Synonyms, a celebration of the magic of youth. You can sense the same wild virility in Ahed’s Knee too, but it’s a souvenir from the past. It belongs to the soldiers. The main actor himself is almost bodiless. Even when you see his body, it’s always shown in a way that makes it almost absent. The only thing that remains is his eyes. And I don’t know if it’s because maybe when one of your parents dies suddenly you start rethinking this balance between life and death. And you move to a different place. Or maybe it’s the age. Or the fact that I was getting a little fed up with my films… In Synonyms I was very eager to reconnect with the feelings I’d experienced twenty years prior, when those events took place. Here, the present was still so vivid that I just had to clutch what was happening in the moment.
NOTEBOOK: I was hoping we could talk a little about the role dancing plays in the film—and in your filmography at large. I remember you saying once that “dancing is a way of declaring yourself to the camera.”
LAPID: Look, I think the movie has lots of funny moments. Someone told me that the film reminded them of a Bollywood flick, because people talk about stuff and then dance. Or sing. But in all fairness, I think that everything in Ahed’s Knee ends badly. Even the dances are never really liberating. They end with a sour, dark taste. I mean, think of the song we used, “Lovely Day.” What could be more uplifting and optimistic than that? We see the director being driven to his screening, and he pictures his driver as he goes home to his wife after a long working day, and dances with her. But then the scene ends with this weird fast motion, where you only see his hands moving, and suddenly the dance becomes more worrying. Darker. Everything in the film is filtered through the main character’s perspective. Even the driver’s dance—it’s really just the director imagining what that dance would look like. When characters dance in Ahed’s Knee, they don’t so much declare themselves, but the tone of the film. In a lot of different variations, because of course “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Lovely Day” are wildly different pieces.
NOTEBOOK: And yet, for all the pessimism the film’s drenched in, there’s something almost exhilarating about the threat Y poses to the establishment. Surely if authorities fear a director so much then that’s an implicit acknowledgment of how cinema can still speak truth to power? I was wondering if you feel that way, and if you’ve registered the same optimism among the new generation of film students you teach.
LAPID: See, the problem is that anytime someone asks me about how I see the future I always feel like a prophet of rage and despair. Unfortunately, what I know, what you call the new generation… I don’t teach so much, but this year I had a marvelous group of students, all so cultivated and curious and interesting. But if you just so much mention the words “political cinema” you’ll see this expression of terrible boredom on their faces. And they’ll tell you that political cinema is what untalented people do when they try to make a film that will have an echo, just because they’re incapable of finding something interesting to say about smaller everyday stories. I think these students are the results of the success of the self-censorship system. I guess it’s a bit like the film, when you have these librarians who will eventually decide what Israelis will love and what they will hate. What they’ll find beautiful and what they’ll find ugly. The people they’ll become. After all, it’s much more efficient to instill boredom in people than to start throwing directors in jail.