Perhaps the most striking film from Israel this past year is “Yes” (Israel/France), which was part of the he Quinzaine or Directors Fortnight from the 2025 Cannes International Film Festival. Nadav Lapid’s brilliant, showy set-pieces which present a caricature of decadence and heartlessness in Israeli society haunted by 7 October, 2023. At the Palm Springs International Film Festival, “Yes” has three showings: Wednesday, January 7, 2026, 12:00 noon, at the Mary Pickford 9; Thursday, January 8, 2026, 8:00 PM, at the Palm Springs Cultural Center 2/3; and Sunday, January 11, 2026, 8:00 PM at the Palm Springs Cultural Center 2/3.
Nadav Lapid’s “Yes” is a fierce, stylized, confrontational caricature-satire that invites a comparison with the art of George Grosz from the 1920s, dialed up to the maximum in its sexualized choreography and almost radioactive with political pain. With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of October 7, 2023.
Y (Ariel Bronz) is a musician and composer married to Yasmin (Efrat Dor) whose family’s money and connections promise a comfortable future for them both and their year-old baby in Tel Aviv. They are enjoying an almost frantic high life of partying, booze and drugs, amid people who want to affirm their reality, to show the world and each other that they are not to be cowed by terrorism and by those who want what they wanted before 7 October – an end to the state of Israel. But we also see two young Israelis who do care of their young child and the complex issue of whether any happiness is possible in that county anymore.
But Y is traumatized by the recent death of his mother and the reality of the family’s cramped conditions in a tiny flat. He composes a new, aggressively anti-Gaza song, apparently with the patronage of a wealthy Russian (played by Aleksei Serebyakov) and, brought to the edge of some profound emotional breakdown by the strain of processing the agony of 7 October, and – perhaps – by the suspicion that the response is futile vengeance, Y abandons his family and heads off to reconnect with his old lover Leah (Naama Preis).
The song is inspired by the activist group Civic Front, which after 7 October released a new version of Haim Gouri’s classic song “Hareut,” or “Fellowship,” with jarring new lyrics calling for wholesale extermination in Gaza. A fictional version of this song features here, with lyrics about attacking the bearers of the swastika (as in the original) but also presents its audience with slick equivalence: the “Nazi” gotcha-comparison is levelled at Israel in a way that it isn’t at other countries.
Figuring that the response of his new setting of the Israeli song is futile vengeance, Y abandons his family and heads off to reconnect with his old lover Leah (Naama Preis). Leah, a translator with access to restricted official documents, can give him the authentic details about the 7 October atrocity – details that Y simultaneously fears and demands. And he is seized with a desire to scream his poem, cruelly or cathartically, from Golani Hill, otherwise known as the Hill of Love, which overlooks Gaza City itself.
Lapid said he had always intended to make a movie about a “submissive artist,” but that the idea evolved after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and as the war unfolded. The first section of the film, titled “The Good Life,” follows Y. and his wife, Yasmine (Efrat Dor), as they lead a shamelessly materialistic and sybaritic lifestyle. The movie kicks off with an unhinged dance number, shot in lengthy takes, at a party. Y. is so physically uninhibited that he even dunks his head into a punch bowl.
“Yes” proceeds through a succession of loosely connected, vaguely allegorical set pieces. Periodically, the war that Y. and Yasmine have strived to keep out of sight intrudes. While Yasmine prepares breakfast, for instance, text alerts about the death toll are suddenly spelled out onscreen, and Lapid cuts out the audio of the kitchen, substituting the sounds of screams and military violence from Gaza.
Lapid pushes the war even further to the foreground in the second section, “The Path,” which finds Y. and an ex-flame, Lea (Naama Preis), driving into the area of the October 7 attack. At Y.’s urging, Lea delivers a lengthy monologue about the events of that day. Soon after, Lapid shows Y. looking out at Gaza in the near distance, with the smoke of combat clearly visible in the background.
There is an odious Russian fintech bro here, commissioning jingoistic, nationalistic music; the suggested equivalence between Putin and Israel is presented without subtlety, although subtlety is maybe beside the point. One fourth-wall breaking scene has one man list the people who are supposedly anti-Israel: the BBC, CNN, the New York Times – and then turn furiously and directly to the camera: “… and you too are anti-Israel!” The final scene with a painful performance of “Hareut” in the old Roman amphitheater in Caesarea leads to near-death experience for Y., as he figures there is no escape from what Israel has become.
