Hmm

... uh, growing up in a small neighborhood in Ramat Gan, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv, and two of, you know, two of them got killed, and the third one had to leave the country.

He couldn't take it.

And, and I was, I was the last man standing.

I was the last one there.

And I, I thought what made me stay, and, and what made me stay was this great love to this place which, which I call home, which I called home then and I call home now.

And it's a place which is not unflawed.

And I think in th- in this age we're currently living in, that's super important for everybody to wake up in the morning believing.

Where did the filmmaker emerge in terms of Avi the young man?

I never thought I'd become a film director because, you know, it's, it's such a lofty [laughs] title, a film director, you know? Hitchcock is a film director.

You know, Spielberg's a film director.

You know, I'm from a small town in Israel.

So I, I wanted to be a film theoretician.

I wrote long, heady essays in really obscure quarterlies.

I, uh, k- grew up in New York in the '60s.

Yeah.

Uh, where do you think this, this new film is going to sit when you said that the challenge to art is time?

I made this movie because I, I, I had, I had a movie come out before this one, a movie called, uh, The Monkey House, and it got really tremendous reviews and very successful at the box office, which is a rare occurrence.

The only problem, we opened a week before October 7th.

So [laughs] we broke all box office records for one week, but we were shut down.

But four or five weeks after, after October 7th, I got a call from a guy from Kibbutz, you know, one of those Kibbutzim who were burned down.

He lost, uh, his brother and his kids, and he said, "Li- listen to a story.

We were dying to see, uh, The Monkey House, and we just couldn't get in.

Can you explain to the audience about having had that experience of losing a young person that helped you show the such terrible loss of young people at Nova and in this film also in Soldiers?