Two films may have played a crucial role in urging voters to vote for the Change bloc over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc in Tuesday’s Israeli elections.
The first became a box office success. The second did not play in the country at all.
As election results come in, the anti-Netanyahu “Change” bloc led by former military commander Gadi Eisenkot’s center-right Yashar (Straight) party is notably behind the far-right government of Netanyahu, the Likud leader and longtime prime minister in power during and after the October 7 attacks. Netanyahu’s bloc has a 54-47 advantage in the Knesset with more than 70% of the vote. But he has no clear path to reaching the 61-seat majority threshold via a coalition government since five of the six parties outside his bloc are very unlikely to join him (and the sixth is a toss-up). A deadlock and new elections in the coming months seem entirely possible.
The first of the two films that could have brought us here is Our Loves by Avi Nesher. A sentimental, action-tinged story about Israelis struggling to survive during the Hamas attacks of October 7, the film wears no politics on its sleeve.
But by showing an absent army and focusing on security failures, the film, for all its undercurrents of unity and patriotism, is at least implicitly critical of the Netanyahu government in place at the time. What’s more, it’s a success. Deliberately released two weeks before the election, the drama garnered 150,000 admissions in Israel – a high number for a non-Hollywood film in the small country, and one that could have given Netanyahu a few more key seats.
Nesher has been open about not supporting the Netanyahu government and said he thinks its members will not like the film. “I don’t share the government’s point of view at all. I will be one of those who will not vote for this government,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at TIFF, and he has continued to make comments along these lines in the Israeli press.
Nesher’s words carry weight, not only because he is a beloved filmmaker, but also because he has made films about emerging from previous eras of crisis (his Rage and glory and meVictory Mage both take place around the nation’s founding conflict in 1948) and it is considered a form of artistic light in the darkness.
The fact that Eisenkot, 66, lost his son fighting in Gaza also gives the film some sort of weight in its favor; it’s easy to watch the film and think about the candidate and what he went through. (This is less the case for Netanyahu, whose own son until recently lived in Miami.) There’s even a tough military character in the film, not much younger than Eisenkot.
The second cinematic key is NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s hit documentary involving two dozen IDF whistleblowers revealing how Netanyahu’s government waged the war in Gaza. Although it has not been published in Israel, the Israeli press has reported on it in recent weeks.
The effect is delicate: Even many of Netanyahu’s critics have criticized the film for not telling the whole story; an anti-IDF film would also not necessarily sit well with at least some Eisenkot supporters. But the Netanyahu government attempted to capitalize on this fact by announcing that it would attempt to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship (there is no known legal basis for them to do so).
While the move worked in favor of Netanyahu’s base, it didn’t seem to make any difference with the large number of voters Likud needed to win over – and in fact, it may have had the opposite effect, giving the impression that the government was not open to any criticism, which Change voters believe should absolutely be in play.
Evaluating the effect of a single document on a complex real-world situation is of course not easy. But the mainstreaming of the war debate – newspapers have been filled with opinion pieces in this media-driven country since its premiere in Venice last month – may have shaken the man who led it. (It’s worth noting that for all of Netanyahu’s political durability over the past three decades, his Likud party today is not a majority force on its own. It received less than 25 percent of the vote on Tuesday and depends on a coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties to get close to a majority.)
Meanwhile, a film edit ended up moving the film needle itself on Tuesday. Wonder Woman Star Gal Gadot — the closest the country currently has to a national icon — posted a video Tuesday of herself at the polls saying she was voting for Change. She came from Los Angeles to vote and, in her Instagram post, urged all Israelis to do the same (about 80 percent did) before noting her anti-Netanyahu bias.
She then even appeared in a sketch on Eretz Nehederet (the Israeli SNL) which aired on election night while polls were still open, getting in an Uber and talking about his life in Los Angeles as an Israeli.
She offered perhaps one of the biggest unspoken truths about the region when the driver asked her if it was difficult to be an Israeli abroad.
“I always explain to people,” she said, referring to the media ecosystem. “What you see there, you don’t see here. And what you see here, you don’t see there.”
Gn entert
