Bodies of land, flesh, politics and families collide in The Bubble, the latest film by Israeli’s most accomplished film director to date, Eytan Fox.
Born in New York City and raised from an early age in Israel, Fox has experienced huge success since he started making films in the early 1990’s. His first feature, Song of the Siren, was Israel’s biggest box office hit of 1994. After creating and directing the Israeli TV dramatic series, Florentine, which was about the ways in which young people dealt with the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, Fox directed the international hit Yossi and Jagger, which was about an affair between two Israel officers. This was followed up by Walk on Water, the most popular Israeli film abroad to date, The film followed a Mossad agent who befriends the grandson of an ex-Nazi officer.
This exclusive interview with Eytan Fox was conducted in person in Los Angeles late last summer. The interview focused on his most recent movie, The Bubble, so let me provide the following précis:
Noam, Yali, and Lula share an apartment in Tel Aviv. Young progressive Israelis fighting for equality, their political quest for justice gets personal when Noam falls in love with Ashraf, a young Palestinian who hangs out in Tel Aviv pretending to be Israeli while hiding his homosexuality from family and friends back home. When an editor at Time Out Israel threatens to expose his identity, Ashraf returns home, where his sister Rana’s is planning her marriage to a Hamas leader named Jihad, the one Palestinian who knows Ashraf’s secret. As the political and personal play themselves out against the boiling background of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, The Bubble seems destined to end in tragedy.
