A few days after Cannes wrapped up last month, my IndieWire colleague Ryan Lattanzio published an interview with filmmaker Nadav Lapid, whose furious new satire of modern Israel quietly premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the very end of the festival. That was a curious and pronounced demotion for a rising auteur whose similarly blistering previous feature (2021’s “Ahed’s Knee”) had been selected for the main Competition, where it emerged from a stacked field to win the Jury Prize. But the world has changed over the last four years, and — according to French outlet Le Nouvel Obs — Cannes president Iris Knobloch is no longer comfortable with shining her festival’s brightest spotlight on a movie so hostile towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing genocide.
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Ryan’s headline, “You May Never Get to See Cannes’ Most Provocative and ‘Dangerous’ Movie,” epitomizes the sensationalism that ad-supported websites like ours sometimes lean on to drive clicks toward stories about two-and-a-half-hour art films that the reader may never get a chance to see (a shocking admission, I know). And truth be told, I might have rolled my eyes at that framing had I not already seen the movie in question But I had seen the movie. Just as importantly, I’ve also seen how other movies about Israel’s war on Gaza have been treated since the events of October 7, 2023, and so — to my great dismay — my only reaction to Ryan’s headline was to wince in recognition of its truth.
Lapid’s film is called “Yes.” The film industry’s response to it has predictably been “no.”
For the first time in my professional career as a critic, there is a subject that some festivals — and virtually all U.S. distributors — are too afraid to touch. In a bleeding-heart business that prides itself on the sensitivity it brings to difficult stories, a business in which people are regularly festooned with awards for shining a light on the darkest corners of human civilization, the Palestinian genocide has become uniquely taboo.
You know things are bleak when the Oscars are the industry’s lone act of moral courage, but in rewarding “No Other Land” with the documentary world’s highest honor, the Academy forced attention onto a crisis that the rest of Hollywood still won’t touch.
Or even to profit from! Even more than its liberal bonafides, our country’s independent film business loves stellar box office returns. However, the overwhelming interest in “No Other Land” — which became an object of great fascination upon its prize-winning premiere at the 2024 Berlinale, and was clearly destined for an Oscar nomination soon thereafter — mysteriously failed to translate into proper distribution.
The film was earmarked for success, and had it been about any other subject, that would have been reason enough for someone to release it. And I was certain that someone would. After all, the moral consequences of settler colonialism is only the single most popular subject in the history of American moviegoing, and so it didn’t seem all that far-fetched to think that a single distributor might be willing to display the same backbone as the YouTube star who sings to my two-year-old daughter about the magic of using the potty.
While rumors persist that producers rejected a handful of offers in order to preserve the movie’s “Netanyahu doesn’t want you to see this” mystique (a source confirmed they balked at a single lowball offer), even the most forward-thinking and outspoken executives I harangued about “No Other Land” last summer told me they couldn’t afford the controversy. Precisely none of them changed their minds after the film was invited to Hollywood’s biggest night.
Needless to say, that’s a sharp break in the history of a business that has long seen a degree of public discomfort as more feature than bug. When rumors spread that “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” would make audiences fear for their very lives, the Lumière brothers’ actuality became an international sensation. Almost 100 years later, the promise of protests and death threats failed to stop Universal Pictures from turning a profit on “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which screened around the world even after an Integralist Catholic group set fire to a Paris cinema in the middle of a screening. Glib or otherwise, examples abound.
But Israel is unique for how its identity as an ethnostate has been weaponized into a rhetorical shield the size of the Iron Dome. Accusations of “anti-Semitism” are routinely used to silence critics — much as right-wing activists invoked misguided accusations of pedophilia to turn “Cuties” into a symbol of supposed liberal depravity. Domestic Zionist groups even threatened to revoke the lease of a theater that screened “No Other Land.” (Upon withdrawing his resolution, Miami Beach mayor Steven Meiner called upon the nonprofit theater in question to screen films in which “the viewpoint of the State of Israel is fully and accurately presented,” which of course describes “No Other Land” to a tee.) Be that as it may, one can only imagine the very real difficulties that distributors might have faced had they put themselves in the line of fire, and so the vast majority of them decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
“No Other Land” was ultimately self-released, and its $2.5 million box office haul made it the third-highest-grossing documentary of 2024. It earned more than any movie ever distributed by the only company that made a formal offer for it.
The point, of course, isn’t that America’s film industry should be doing more to profit off the back of an unspeakable humanitarian catastrophe. The point is that America’s film industry is displaying a collective degree of cowardice that finds it deliberately acting against its own ethos as both an artform and a business. The former is routine, but the latter is remarkable.
For me, it represents a moral abstention wholly unprecedented in my lifetime. Consider Hollywood’s relatively decisive reaction to other global crises. The AIDS outbreak is an imperfect comparison for several reasons, but I’m struck by the fact that sober and enduring movies about the epidemic were widely distributed as early as 1985 despite the virulent demonization of its victims. Michael Moore was booed at the Oscars for voicing his opposition to the Iraq War in 2003, only for “Fahrenheit 9/11” to gross more than $222 million the very next year. Today, it often takes less than a week for a disaster to become the subject of its own Hulu documentary.
While the films’ impact on government policy and/or public opinion is debatable, movies large and small have been at the forefront of some of the 21st century’s most difficult conversations. It was the movies that told us that climate change is real. That Michael Jackson was bad. That McDonald’s makes you fat. It was the movies that revealed the extent of the American government’s efforts to surveil its own people, took us into the broken heart of the war in Ukraine, and proved that octopuses can teach you things.
And now, among all forms of popular media, it’s the movies that now feel uniquely feckless as they respond with uncharacteristic silence to one of the worst ongoing atrocities of our time.
As the Jewish grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I haven’t been shy about my feelings toward the atrocities being committed in Gaza. The horror I feel about them being conducted in my name, and with my tax dollars, is obviously at the root of my frustration with the film industry’s continued refusal to meet — or even observe — the moment. It’s a refusal so complete that Badie and Hamza Ali had to launch their own label, Watermelon Pictures, to ensure that urgent documentaries like “From Ground Zero” and “The Encampments” were made available to American viewers.
And yet, I didn’t write this column just to revisit the lack of support for “No Other Land,” or even to bemoan the fact that “Yes” faces even bleaker prospects at receiving proper distribution. Not only is Lapid’s film a much thornier piece of work that’s willing to provoke viewers on both sides of the “is genocide good?” debate (a license it self-grants by acknowledging the absurdity of that question), but its lack of awards potential denies it the best sales hook that “No Other Land” had to its advantage.
The specialized market is on its knees at the moment and many of its biggest players are partially funded by Israeli money. Still, this represents a striking reversal of fortune for Lapid, a filmmaker whose previous movies have all been released in the United States despite sharing the same mercilessly self-excoriating approach to Israeli-ness that rages beneath every minute of “Yes.”
I suspected that would be the case for whatever movie Lapid chose to make in the aftermath of October 7. While I was dismayed that every distribution executive I spoke to at Cannes seemed to shudder at the mere thought of acquiring “Yes,” I wasn’t surprised. What caught me off guard, and what inspired me to yell back into the void about an all-too-familiar subject (at a time of such widespread chaos that it seems ridiculous to think the film industry matters at all) was the possibility that “Yes” may not even get another chance to be ignored.
It hadn’t occurred to me that this singularly vital addition to post-October 7 cinema that dared to do more than pick a side might be shunned from the same festivals that leapt at the chance to screen his previous work.
“Yes” has not been formally rejected from Telluride, TIFF, NYFF, or any of the other marquee stops on the fall circuit, but as of this writing I can confirm that it has yet to be privately invited to any of them either, which isn’t an encouraging sign at this point in the summer. I’m confident that cooler heads will prevail, especially at festivals that have long embraced political antagonism as a raison d’être, but the uncertainty alone is enough to redouble my fear that the film industry’s recent conservatism is trickling upward even faster than it’s trickling down from the executive level.
The problem is worsened by the broken and outmoded state of the Oscars’ Best International Feature category, which lets foreign governments handpick their own submissions and launder their public images. While recent nominees like “I’m Still Here,” “Collective,” and “Argentina, 1985” didn’t flatter their home countries, the system gives authoritarian regimes the power to bury dissenting films. China can block wider recognition of Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides,” Iran can limit the audience for Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” and Georgia can suppress Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April” — a film so politically explosive it forced its director into exile. The Academy process enables the very abuses these films seek to expose.
That the Israeli Film Fund contributed financing to “Yes” is 1) hilarious, and 2) no reason to hope the country would submit a legendary self-own to the Academy Awards. (Lapid told Ryan he wasn’t sure the government was even aware of the movie’s existence.)
How much does that matter in the grand scheme of things? Even in an alternate universe where “Yes” wound up in the mix on Oscar night, it’s not as if it would drastically reconfigure the discourse about the genocide in Gaza. A little gold man doesn’t have the power to un-kill 50,000 children any more than it has the power to spare the deaths of 50,000 more. “No Other Land” winning an Academy Award didn’t even prevent the further desecration of the area depicted in the film, nor did it prevent producer Hamdan Ballal from being savagely attacked by a group of masked settlers soon after he returned home from Los Angeles.
The Dolby Theatre hosted two of Hollywood’s only meaningful attempts to confront the slaughter, and those moments landed with disproportionate force because they pierced through our community’s galling abstention from this atrocity. The speeches from the “No Other Land” team earlier this year, and “The Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer the year before, cast a brief, glaring light on a crisis that the industry continues to ignore. In those moments, television confronted a reality that film has refused to acknowledge for itself— a humiliating failure for a medium once hailed as “truth 24 times per second.”
I’ve long argued that movies have a brighter future than streaming lobbyists would have us believe, but such willful blindness is the only thing that’s ever truly dimmed my optimism for the medium’s continued value. In a world starved for the very truth that our industry has neglected to acknowledge, what value could the cinema possibly hold if it lacks the courage to show us the reality that confronts us on every other screen?
