Censorship is a scary thing, but it could be particularly dangerous when it involves assimilation and heritage. Nadav Lapid has been tackling these subjects for ten years now, straddling the line between sensitivity, morality, and justice. Ahed’s Knee is his latest, confronting the subject of censorship head on. Winner of this year’s Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Ahed’s Knee follows a filmmaker named “Y” (Avshalom Pollak) who attends a screening of his previous film held by the Ministry of Culture in a remote village at the far end of the Israeli desert. While there, he befriends an officer of the ministry, Yaholom (Nur Fibak), as he’s forced to succumb to the nation’s censorship standards. Originally, we had planned to meet in person at Cannes, but a COVID scare forced Nadav Lapid and actors Avshalom Pollak and Nur Fibak to conduct this interview via Zoom where we talked about censorship, assimilation, and what it took to make a film that’s so critical of the Israeli government, especially in today’s political climate.
“I think that it’s about how to be…” begins Lapid. “…is it impossible to be normally Israeli, in a way? But I think its relevant to a lot of places. Is it possible to be normally Russian? Is it possible to be normally Brazilian? Is it possible to me normally Polish? Where do we situate ourselves… from submission and collaboration, to resistance and endless anger that in the end dehumanizes all others, and makes all others enemies? I’m always obsessed with what I see as Israeli collective soul, mainly because it’s also my soul, and with Israeli collective DNA, mainly because of the fact it’s also my DNA. But I think that, in the end, it’s a question of how do we live? How do we live in this actual moment in time?”
But Ahed’s Knee’s premise actually stems from a real-life experience not dissimilar from the film.
“All of this was a very unusual creative process,” Lapid continues. “The technical genesis of the thing was when I got this phone call from a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture, who was a very intelligent, nice, and curious young woman, inviting me to come to a small village in the desert for a screening of Kindergarten Teacher. And at the very end of our conversation, she added ‘Oh by the way, you must sign a form or I’ll detail the topics of our discussion,’ exactly like in the movie. She said ‘Yeah I’m not very proud of what I’m doing now,’ which was quite surprising – she totally accepted the fact that what she’s doing is wrong, and yet with no problems, she told me afterward, ‘Ok you sign the form and will send it to me by fax.’ Another thing was that my mother was agonizing and dying from cancer, and she was the editor of my movies. I was going to the desert and sending her more or less the same video messages that you see in the movie. Usually writing the script takes me one year, one year and a half, more or less like most other people. I started to write the script three or four weeks after the death of my mother, and edited in two weeks. And 10, 11 months later, we began shooting. So, everything was just like one movement, one gesture. One extremely urgent gesture. We decided to not apply a lot of financial services to shoot in very basic, hard economic conditions, because we prioritized the urgency. Because the urgency was the truth of the thing.”
For the actors, however, it was an exercise in how agile they could be in developing a character, given the limiting circumstances.
“I joined the project really late,” adds Pollak. “So after joining the project, they were quickly going into shooting. The way the character was conceived or built, it’s like… I can describe it a little bit as like making a dish… how you cook something and put different ingredients inside. So it’s like taking the text, taking the conversation with Nadav, taking my intuition into it, taking my abilities into it, taking my interpretations into it, taking my experience as a person that knows the body of a choreographer… So all of that kind of created this very unique, disturbed, powerful, fragile character in the end. Which I believe it’s also because of the people that were involved in the movie, and the way Nur and I were getting along… that’s part of the magic of creation. I think for Nur, she was on board for a longer time.”
“Maybe for the auditions,” Fibak chimes in. “But I think a month and a half before shooting or something like that they sent me the script, told me ‘you’re in…’ I think that the main thing that I worked with Nadav was to build the whole inside story of [Yaholom], and the whole moment before this story started. And I think when we arrived on set for the start of shooting, I really let go. I really just let the things happen naturally. I worked really hard to just be in the right place, like in a kind of mediation, to be in a particular point and a particular way of how I’m coming to this story. We were shooting in a chronological order, so I really prepared for this to happen naturally for me. And everything was really intense emotionally on set and the script is really, really strong, and the meeting with Avshalom and the way he’s doing his stuff, I just let myself be. And I think when you have freedom on set, things really happen. I didn’t say to myself ‘here you’re supposed to cry, here you’re supposed to be…’ I just dive in.”
His previous film, 2019’s Synonyms, another study on heritage, won Nadav Lapid the Golden Bear at that year’s Berlinale, so surely that had to help speed up financing for Ahed’s Knee.
“Yes, surely it helped,” Lapid admits. “We made the film with I think 1.2 million Euros, something like this, and shot the film in 18 days. I haven’t seen any other films in competition. I’m sure all of them are great, but I doubt any of them were shot under such conditions. Because there were very short days. Nine hours of light in a day because it was winter and the day hardly began and you’re already at the end of the day. So, it helped, but it helped to preserve, as I said, the urgency. It helped us to quickly get a certain amount of money and to say ‘okay, now we go shoot it.’ I think, for me, the main thing that it gave me was the liberty, the liberty to tell myself ‘great, I have this nice golden bear at my house, and now I can go deeper…’ deeper into this deserted, or half-deserted landscape of cinema. It gave me the capacity to tell other people in a way ‘count on me, I know what I’m doing.’ But it gave me the confidence in my own [self] doubt to free the demons.”
“In Ahed’s Knee, you play with objectivity and subjectivity a lot,” I bring up. “Usually, when we see the landscape, it’s subjective to the character, yet you kind of flip that on the head this time: we see the landscape, but it’s objective from [Y’s] point of view, and when it’s subjective from him, we see his objection to the land. But you translate it through these crazy camera movements, this swinging camera language. I wanted to ask why you choose that kind of choreography for the camera to translate that.”
Lapid takes a moment. “I have various answers,” he says. “The most general one I would say is that I find it really hard to understand how, despite the fact that people are so different, they have so many different things to say… 99% of the movies look alike. For me, someone who is writing his most personal text… personalizing the form of your movies is I think the most logical and rational step, to take it out from the 30,000 movies done exactly the same way. Especially in this movie, I’m a huge believer in what I feel is the true deep essence of the moment. As we know, the true deep essence of the moment doesn’t end in the concrete or the practical description of what’s happening. I mean, in general, especially in such a movie, you must go deeper. Penetrate the object. It goes to the mind, the thoughts, the reflection, the heart, the emotions… and it’s super hard to do it with a camera. It’s much easier to do it when you’re a painter, for instance. When you’re an expressionist German painter, when you’re Jackson Pollock who’s running and hitting the canvas. But with a camera it’s hard, because a camera is a very concrete thing. Put down the camera and you see what’s happening in front of you. Sometimes you have to battle with your own camera. You have to spoil it. And some of this movement is like tentative to make the camera sweat, to make it less confident, less distant, so that the camera won’t feel so comfortable.”
Lapid’s films, as a result, do not stem from traditional cinematic influences.
“Before shooting a movie,” Lapid continues. “I feel I can watch 15 movies a day. Not entirely, of course, but small pieces, fast forward and backwards. But I fill myself with cinematic gestures, so I have maybe 20,000 references and influences. But I think in the end, my films – you can love them or hate them – are in a way, mine. I think that they have a certain core, a certain substance that’s distinguished from others. And second, I feel that my references… prevent me from falling to cinematic evidences. Think about shot-reverse-shot: I mean, for me, it’s not logical when 99.9% of the dialogue in the movie is shot in a shot-reverse-shot. And you see one person talking, then the other talking, or maybe one talking, one listening. I mean the conversations are super different – sometimes they talk about the second world war, sometimes they talk about their bathroom, sometimes they talk about their son, sometimes they talk about sex. But they’re always more or less shot in the same way. So I think all these directors that help me detach myself from the evidence and reinvent and rethink my conventions are my kind of references.”
“There’s a line in the film,” I follow up, “that goes ‘in the end, geography wins.’ And I wanted to see how you interpret that line and what it means to you. Because it was striking when it was on screen.”
“That comes from my mother,” Lapid gets candid. “This was one of the favorites of my mother when she was talking about Israel. And as [Y] says in his short introduction, she wouldn’t say it in a positive way… It means that you can be as much as you want in a kind of position of resistance, detached. In the end, you become another detail in landscape.”
“I tend to never get a very definite understanding about anything,” admits Shalom. “I always try to keep possibilities. So it’s not one thing, in my opinion. I think it’s both geographical as it is political, or as a country, a nation, a society, and so on. But geographically, it’s also like nature. It’s the nature of what’s going on. It’s the Earth… So I think this is something that is much more… it takes you to places that are much wider than being specific about what it is.”
Fibak, however, is a little more exploratory. “I don’t really know. I think every time I hear this sentence I’ve taken it to another direction. When I only read [it] on paper, it’s not something really logical to me, but I felt something really strong about the land. And that we are all the time fighting or loving things that are connected to, in our country at least, the land, the earth, a map, boarders, and sand. It’s really connected to Israel. The whole story of desert and things like that. It wasn’t something really where I understood the meaning. And I think this is what’s really powerful with this sentence – that it’s changing all the time, and it’s really open. It’s strong because it’s…,” she scrambles, trying to grasp the right words.
“…Well there’s something very interesting now from what Nur was saying,” Pollak swoops in. “For Israelis, when they talk about Israel, most of the Israelis say ‘Ha’aretz,’ and the interpretation of Ha’aretz is ‘are you returning to the land.’ It’s a very kind of, y’know, as Nur was saying, a very important flow. Even to the Jews… they found a piece of land where they can be, where they can run away from all their problems, etc. I think the great thing about it is it’s not like something that has a straight forward meaning, but it kind of triggers something that can go and go and go and go.”
Fibak follows up, “But I think that it’s really interesting that in the movie, it’s a meeting between someone like Avshalom’s character who is living big city life… but coming to a place where all the people there are working the land. And the image of coming from the sky in an airplane to a place that is really grounded and people are not dealing with the big questions and stuff like that. I don’t know. This is for me what the meaning was. I don’t think I have an answer. But I have a lot of answers.”
Then, as the dust settled, the elephant in the room finally made itself apparent: How comfortable were they being a part of a film that is so critical of their government?
There’s a beat of silence. After the tense moment, Lapid gives in, “I’m not a political journalist, not a political expert in any way. I think that Netanyahu is a terrible prime minister, but he wasn’t worse than his period, or his time, or the spirit. I mean he was pushed by an extremely dominant spirit that existed and still exists in Israeli society. For me it’s funny that they call themselves the ‘government of change’ or something like this. I mean, where’s such a change? They are the oldest new government I’ve ever seen I think.”
“I can say about myself… that I didn’t look… I don’t know,” Fibak adds on. “It’s a really good story. And it’s really important to do really good art and tell really good stories. And to be part of art that is saying something today is sometimes not so easy… films that are trying to change or trying to do something bigger and not just, y’know, achieve fame and stuff like that. So, it was, for me, really a good opportunity to be part of something big and important. And I didn’t really think in the beginning about what would happen next. Because I’m working as an actress in this project, but… I don’t know.”
“I don’t think it’s about what will happen next, it’s about what’s happening before,” follows Pollak. “In my opinion, I think it’s irrelevant. I think it’s the wrong kind of discussion from the beginning, whether you should be careful not to criticize or go against the general opinion of the country by creating a creation or a piece of art. I listened in the press conference to this question, and I think there’s a very simple answer to that: why not? Why not give money to things which criticize? As actors or artists, people criticize us. And we’re getting money, and the people who criticize get money, and this is what they do. Because this is a part of democracy and a society that is trying to advance. So that’s a very kind of, I think, simple answer. On the other hand, for the real people who want to change something, and really oppose… they are giving up so much of their lives in order to do that. And this is also a big, big question: whether giving up your life will make a change in the end.”
In the end, it may seem daunting that governments with such power over censorship could still exist in the world, despite funding and praising art that criticizes. Because in the end, geography always does win – even with Nadav Lapid on our side.
Ahed’s Knee will make its North American premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Featured photo courtesy of Getty Images