{"id":8333,"date":"2025-06-03T15:21:18","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T15:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/03\/lapids-yes-and-films-of-dissidence-and-rebellion-at-cannes-2025\/"},"modified":"2025-06-03T15:21:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T15:21:20","slug":"lapids-yes-and-films-of-dissidence-and-rebellion-at-cannes-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/03\/lapids-yes-and-films-of-dissidence-and-rebellion-at-cannes-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Lapid\u2019s \u2018Yes!\u2019 and Films of Dissidence and Rebellion at Cannes 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nadav Lapid\u2019s Yes!<\/em> Les Films du Losange, Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The history of the Cannes Film Festival is underscored by a sense of rebellion. After all, its creation in 1939 was in response to Mussolini\u2019s undue influence over the Venice Film Festival. Whether or not Cannes retains this righteous stature today is a matter of debate. A glance at this year\u2019s lineup might yield an affirmative response, especially since the festival\u2019s coveted trophy\u2014the Palme d\u2019Or, or the Golden Palm\u2014was awarded to Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi<\/a> for the fierce comedy-drama It Was Just an Accident<\/i>, his first movie since being released from prison. However, a curious controversy surrounded a more brash and explicit work: Nadav Lapid<\/a>\u2019s vicious satire Yes!<\/i>, which the Israeli director believes was bumped from the festival\u2019s main competition (in favor of a slot in the Directors\u2019 Fortnight sidebar) for its critique of Israel\u2019s war on Gaza<\/a>. \u201c[The film] became\u2014unwittingly\u2014a kind of tool which measures cowardice and courage,\u201d Lapid told IndieWire, opening a wider conversation on whether the movie will find distribution both in the U.S. and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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Jafar Panahi\u2019s It Was Just an Accident<\/em>. Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cannes has long been a Hollywood-friendly event\u2014especially under the auspices of Thierry Fr\u00e9maux, its director for over 20 years\u2014and has more recently become a major platform for mainstream cinema, with six of the last seven Palme d\u2019Or winners going on to have a presence at the Academy Awards. Two of them, Bong Joon-ho\u2019s class thriller Parasite<\/i> and Sean Baker<\/a>\u2019s neorealist fairytale Anora<\/i>, even closed out the broadcast with Best Picture Oscars in hand. Cannes arguably wields more institutional power than it ever has, leaving in a precarious place the question of how much room it can truly create for cinema that speaks truth to power.<\/p>\n

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Tarzan and Arab Nasser\u2019s Once Upon a Time in Gaza<\/em>. Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just last year, the Palestinian anthology film From Ground Zero<\/i>\u2014which was shot by twenty-two filmmakers under military siege, and which would go on to become Palestine\u2019s submission to the Oscars\u2019 Best International Feature category\u2014was accepted by Cannes but was subsequently pulled \u201con political grounds<\/a>,\u201d leading to a private guerrilla premiere<\/a> as an act of protest. This year\u2019s program, however, saw multiple Palestinian selections, which might be seen as mea culpas. The 2007-set crime drama Once Upon a Time in Gaza<\/i> played in the festival\u2019s prestigious Un Certain Regard competition (where it won the Best Director Award) while the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk<\/i>, about young Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona<\/a>, was announced as part of the L\u2019ACID sidebar in April. Hassona was tragically killed in an Israeli airstrike the very next day, prompting a tribute from the festival<\/a> shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n

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Sepideh Farsi\u2019s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk<\/em>. Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, where Once Upon a Time in Gaza<\/i> and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk<\/i> condemn annexations and bombardments\u2014active instances of military incursion\u2014Lapid\u2019s satire hits much closer to home, unearthing the root causes of these violent symptoms by taking aim at broader swathes of societal malaise. Holding such a blatant and contemporary mirror to complicity is bound to rustle some feathers. Lapid is an Israeli filmmaker living in Paris and has made several movies in which Israeli characters struggle with their indoctrination into fervent nationalism. However, Yes!<\/i> is perhaps his most brazen indictment of militarism to date. It focuses on comedian and adult entertainer Y (Ariel Bronz<\/a>) who, in the aftermath of Hamas\u2019 October 7 attack, is conscripted to compose music for a new national anthem for his country, whose lyrics are steeped in bloodthirst and vengeance.<\/p>\n

The film, though it meanders on occasion, conjures an unkempt fury en route to a devastating final act. Its camera shakes and shivers even during farcical moments of song and dance, as though bursting with an anger that can seldom be contained or expressed in words\u2014but this doesn\u2019t stop Lapid\u2019s voiceover from directly stating his themes. As his characters go about their mundane, sheltered lives in Tel Aviv, iPhone news alerts denote the latest death tolls in Gaza. These notifications are accompanied not just by beeps and chimes, but by agonizing, disembodied screams, as Yes!<\/i> begins to bear resemblance to another Cannes and Oscar darling from two years ago: Jonathan Glazer\u2019s The Zone of Interest<\/i><\/a>, a period drama in which a Nazi officer\u2019s family ignores the sounds of atrocities behind the wall of an adjacent Jewish extermination camp.<\/p>\n

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Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s The Secret Agent<\/em>. Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This comparison doesn\u2019t feel accidental. Lapid\u2019s farcical, Starship Troopers<\/i>-esque satire soon becomes imbued with tremendous emotional weight, and the movie\u2019s voiceover laments how a society might become as genocidal as the very persecutors it once fled. One can only guess, but such an incendiary comparison might have been at the root of Yes!<\/i> being pushed into a section with far less media attention. Many had previously speculated that Yes!<\/i> would be a shoo-in for the main competition (like his previous movie Ahed\u2019s Knee<\/i>, which deconstructs militaristic notions of Israeli masculinity). However, the festival was not without other titles that trained their crosshairs on authoritarianism both past and present.<\/p>\n

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Kirill Serebrennikov\u2019s The Disappearance of Josef Mengele<\/em>. Andrejs Strokins, Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Panahi\u2019s aforementioned Palme d\u2019Or winner follows a group of freed dissenters debating what they should do with a man they suspect of having tortured them in captivity. It channels the anger and trauma that fester in the aftermath of interrogation by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard\u2014to which Panahi is no stranger. Another dissident filmmaker with a Cannes premiere was Russia\u2019s Kirill Serebrennikov<\/a>, whose biopic The Disappearance of Josef Mengele<\/a><\/i> both told the post\u2013World War II story of the Nazi \u201cangel of death,\u201d as he absconded across South America, and subtly painted a backdrop in which fascist ideas were allowed to prosper in the countries he frequented\u2014among them Argentina and Brazil.<\/p>\n

The latter nation was also the subject of Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s Best Director and Best Actor winner The Secret Agent<\/i> led by Wagner Moura<\/a>, about a man in hiding during Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Like Serebrennikov\u2019s movie, it\u2019s a work whose commentary on fascism unravels subtly and gradually. The details of its central premise aren\u2019t even clarified until over an hour into its runtime, if only because it\u2019s a tale of secrecy and mirrors the hushed flow of information necessary to keep one safe from watchful eyes.<\/p>\n

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\u00d3liver Lax\u2019s Sir\u00e2t<\/i>. <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s film pairs nicely with an even more abstract work: \u00d3liver Lax\u2019s Sir\u00e2t<\/i>, a Spanish production (and eventual Jury Prize winner) that, although not about any one contemporary conflict, captures the feeling of living on a knife\u2019s edge. Set in the Moroccan desert as World War III breaks and E.U. citizens are harbored to safety, the enveloping road adventure follows a middle-aged father joining a group of ravers in order to find his missing teenage daughter, who he believes he\u2019ll find at a party at the end of the world. With thumping bass that creates a sense of foreboding, the film becomes a stress test for its characters as new tragedies befall them at every turn, reflecting the sensation of tumbling down an ever-deepening rabbit hole of despair.<\/p>\n

Each of these films is incredibly accomplished. However, the sensations they individually re-create can all be found bunched together in Lapid\u2019s Yes!<\/i>\u2014which is admittedly far less finessed, if only because it bursts at the seams with the kind of righteous wrath upon which Cannes was originally built.<\/p>\n

That Lapid\u2019s movie was featured at all speaks, perhaps, to the cautiously widening room for movies whose dissent tends not to align with Western political interests. However, that Yes!<\/i> wasn\u2019t platformed to the degree it could have been makes it less likely to find distribution in some territories, including the United States, where movies critical of the Israeli government\u2019s actions (like the Oscar-winning West Bank documentary No Other Land<\/i>) have had to self-fund their releases. In a political moment where the Trump regime has threatened to deport those protesting the war in Gaza<\/a>, it\u2019s especially incumbent on American distributors to bridge this divide, though whether Yes!<\/i> will prove too radioactive for theatrical interests remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

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