‘Bliss (Hemda)’ Director Talks Israeli Film Backlash by Major Festivals: “They Don’t Want Us Anymore”

Israeli novelist and director Shemi Zarhin is set to screen his latest movie, Bliss (Hemda) at the Toronto Film Festival with virtually all the certainties in his life and work scrambled by the current war in Gaza that followed the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on southern Israel.

“I can’t explain my people. I can explain nothing,” Zarhin told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday about the impossibility of unpacking the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in his own films and the wider Israeli cinema.

Hardly a critique of Israeli’s polarized society, Zarhin wrote and shot Bliss (Hemda) before the Israeli-Gaza war broke out late last year with devastating destruction in the region, and it’s not an overtly political film as it centers on an older couple, Sassi and Efi, played by Sasson Gabay and Assi Levy.

Burdened by part time jobs, they struggle with the everyday complications and cares of family, especially when two young men suddenly come back into their lives and threaten their fragile marriage. Zarhin recalled being in the last stages of post production on his film when the events of Oct. 7 occurred in Israel.

Suddenly, he wanted to stop work on the project, known as Hemda in Hebrew. “I was so devastated by what was happening and I had no interest the film. But I couldn’t let down the dozens of people that worked in the film. This is their living, so we continued to work,” he remembered.

But completing the film was complicated by scenes shot in northern Israel, where Zarhin grew up. The locations were subsequently bombed and destroyed by Hezbollah missiles fired from southern Lebanon. “All the locations that we filmed in suddenly look different than they were. Most of them were evacuated of people, so they look like Westerns,” he explained of the Upper Galilee community where the film was made.

And a community center with a swimming pool that was a key location in Hemda was entirely destroyed. “You look at your film that you didn’t finish and reality suddenly makes it a record for a land or territory that maybe will never come back to like it was,” Zarhin said.

Despite Bliss (Hemda) being like pre-9/11 movies that show the World Trade Centers on the horizon, the Israeli director rejects the notion that his observational family drama imitates life in helping to explain the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I don’t think films have to obey reality. I think our purpose, our mission, in a way is to stretch the limit of reality and make what is impossible, possible,” Zarhin insisted as Bliss (Hemda) stays well away from his country’s political, ethnic and religious conflicts.

The reaction to Bliss (Hemda) among theatrical audiences has also vastly changed compared to the reception for earlier movies Zarhin made like Passover Fever, Aviva, My Love, The World Is Funny and The Kind Words, which played at TIFF in 2015.

He recounted the first Israeli premiere of Bliss (Hemda) with a theater filled with local residents from where the film was shot in northern Israel. “They just sat there and cried, because they looked at their homes. And it was a message from a very, very old past which doesn’t exist anymore,” Zarhin said.

Zarhin accepts cinema audiences are giving films from his country a cold shoulder, but the ignorance or rushes to judgement frustrate him. “Picking a side is easier than picking a restaurant,” he observed.

Even getting Bliss (Hemda) into TIFF for its international premiere was a big surprise for the director and his producers, given major film festivals these days don’t want the bitter politics of Oct. 7 and its aftermath in Gaza to disrupt their events.

“They don’t want us anymore and this (TIFF invite) could break the curse,” Zarhin said. That’s because news of TIFF programming Bliss (Hemda) was followed by unexpected interest from foreign distributors and festivals.

“Suddenly, a lot of buyers were writing us and asking for a movie link and even suggesting terms for a deal,” Zarhin said.

The Toronto Film Festival runs through to Sept. 15.