The Gist

The Bubble

I interviewed the Israeli director Eytan Fox on the show yesterday, whose new film The Bubble is opening across this country in a couple of weeks. A controversial film, it received sensational reaction and won awards at Outfest in LA, the Tribeca Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and I was blown away by it myself. Two gay friends living with their straight girlfriend in Tel Aviv, one of the gay guys dating a Palestinian, and of course amid all the horrific conflict of the Middle East.

A lot of people will remember Fox's 2004 film Yossi and Jagger, about two Israeli gay soldiers in love; it received a lot of attention on the gay film circuit in the states. He had another acclaimed and controversial film in between that film and The Bubble, called Walk on Water. I was glad to have a chance to speak with Fox on the show and talk about how queerness and homosexuality play out within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what it is like to be gay both in Israel and in the West Bank and what he seems to be saying about the Israeli left. Go see the film, very powerful.

Update:Musician Ivri Lider, who wrote the score for The Bubble, was blacklisted by the Israeli army, and talks for the first time about it in the new edition Out.