Two films may have played a significant part in moving Israeli voters toward the Change bloc and away from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday's election. One has become a box-office success. The other was never shown in Israeli cinemas.
As results arrived, the anti-Netanyahu Change bloc, led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot and his center-right Yashar (Straight) party, appeared to have narrowly beaten the far-right government of Netanyahu, who leads Likud. Most local television decision desks put the split in the 120-seat parliament at 52 to 50 in favor of Yashar and its main ally B'Yachad (Together). That would give the Change bloc the mandate to build a government by reaching the 61-seat Knesset majority. Netanyahu is expected to contest Eisenkot's claim to that mandate, which is controlled by Israel's president.
The first film is Avi Nesher's Our Loves, an action-tinged, sentimental drama about Israelis fighting to survive during the October 7 Hamas attacks. It does not make its politics explicit. Yet by portraying an absent army and dwelling on security failures, it is at least implicitly critical of the government in power at the time, despite its themes of unity and patriotism.
The film was released deliberately two weeks before the vote and has drawn 150,000 admissions in Israel, a high figure for a non-Hollywood title in such a small country. That number may exceed the margin that separated the two blocs: a Knesset seat requires roughly 50,000 votes under the current tallies, and the Change bloc's lead amounts to two seats.
Nesher has said openly that he does not back the government and believes its members would dislike the film. "I do not share the government's point of view at all. I'll be one of those people who are not voting for this government," he told The Hollywood Reporter at TIFF. His voice carries weight as a beloved filmmaker whose earlier works, Rage and Glory and Image of Victory, are set around the 1948 founding conflict. Eisenkot, 66, lost a son fighting in Gaza, which lends the film added resonance, and it includes a tough military character not much younger than the candidate.
The second film is NAZA, a documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor featuring two dozen IDF whistleblowers who describe how Netanyahu's government has conducted the war in Gaza. It has not been released in Israel, but the Israeli press has covered it extensively in recent weeks.
Its effect is hard to read. Even many of Netanyahu's critics have faulted the film for not telling the whole story, and an anti-IDF documentary may not sit well with some Eisenkot supporters. The government sought to exploit the controversy by suggesting it would try to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, though there is no known legal basis for doing so. The move appealed to Netanyahu's base but did not appear to persuade the broad group of voters Likud needed, and it may have backfired by suggesting the government cannot tolerate criticism, which Change voters believe should be allowed.
Measuring the influence of a single documentary on such a complex situation is difficult. Still, since its Venice premiere last month, newspapers in the media-heavy country have been filled with opinion pieces on it, bringing the debate over the war into the mainstream and possibly damaging the man who has led it.
A film star also weighed in. Gal Gadot, the Wonder Woman actor and perhaps the country's closest thing to a national icon, posted a video of herself at the polls on Tuesday saying she was voting for Change. She flew in from Los Angeles to cast her ballot and urged all Israelis to vote, as about 80 percent did. She also appeared in a sketch on Eretz Nehederet, the Israeli equivalent of SNL, that aired on election night while polls were still open. Asked by an Uber driver whether being an Israeli abroad is hard, she said: "I'm always explaining to people. What you see there you don't see here. And what you see here you don't see there."
