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What Next - He Made 2026's "Most Controversial Film"

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.56K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2026

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

An Israeli filmmaker, who returned home from abroad after October 7, attempts to capture the feeling of mourning becoming a thirst for revenge among his compatriots, in a film he describes as a “bomb.”


Guest: Nadav Lapid, Israeli screenwriter and film director of Yes!


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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

There's this movie I saw the other day that afterwards I just had to talk to someone about.

0:13.8

The movie is called Yes. It's about post-October 7th Israel. It's a comedy, sort of.

0:28.0

It's also filled with technicolor anger at the way Israelis have become complicit in violence.

0:40.2

Yes, skewers in Israeli society it portrays as drunk on its own power, paranoid about the world around it, and partying its ass off, all while smoke rises from the rubble in Gaza.

0:45.5

The movie's directed by an Israeli expat, a guy named Nadav Lapid.

0:50.0

He's been accused of hating his home country.

0:52.5

But like a lot of dissidents I've met, I think Nadav's love for his home is just complicated.

0:58.8

Tough love, you might call it.

1:01.5

I mean, I have a friend, a filmmaker, who israeli, who lives there for a long time,

1:07.7

older than me, who told me in a certain way for me you are the most

1:11.6

Israeli filmmaker among us since you're obsessed with this place and you can't get rid of

1:17.1

this obsession.

1:18.3

This, of course, is Nadav.

1:21.8

I wanted to talk to you because your latest film is about post-October 7th Israel. And it is somehow both a very serious

1:31.5

commentary on the war in Gaza and absurd in a way that I'd compare to early John Waters' work.

1:40.2

It's been called the most controversial movie of the year. Do you buy that?

1:46.2

I would say that, I guess that you know, that if you take the most explosive topic that

1:53.4

exists of this moment, and you put it on the screen with what can consider it as a very explosive form of cinema.

2:06.7

So the result is a kind of a bomb.

2:11.1

You think of your movie as a bomb.

2:13.8

Yeah, yeah. So I can, I can, I can relate to it.

2:17.8

I'll get to the plot of yes in a little bit.

...

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