Too Close for Comfort: Nadav Lapid’s Film Ken at the Viennale
28. 10. 2025 / Muriel Blaive
čas čtení
8 minut
"Ken" means “yes” in Hebrew. But in Nadav Lapid’s latest film, this
single word opens into a moral labyrinth. It can mean agreement,
consent, obedience – the “yes” one sometimes gives in surrender
to power, war, and violence. But it can also be the “yes” to the
desperate temptation to escape and leave behind the inhumane regime
in which one becomes complicit by virtue of living in it – a yes to
moral integrity and freedom. The tension between these meanings runs
through every frame of the film and gives irony and depth to its
title.
The
film lasts two and a half hours and plays on the occasionally
profound vulgarity of the Tel Aviv rich party scene, so much so that
I very nearly left in the first five minutes — yet it is complex,
demanding, and deeply courageous. Lapid himself was there to present
it, as well as for the Q&A afterwards. He looked almost as
exhausted by life as his main character, Y, but found a rapport with
the audience when the film was applauded, by no means an obvious
outcome considering the topic – the way Israeli society is
experiencing the aftermath of 7 October and the war in Gaza.
A
camera that cuts to the bone
At
the Q&A, someone in the audience asked Lapid why the camera
stayed so close to the actors’ faces, often uncomfortably near. He
replied: “Because it cuts to the bone — the situation we’re all
in now. We’re in the middle of it, very close, too close for
comfort.” That sentence could stand as the key to the entire film.
Ken
refuses distance. It forces us to look without flinching, without the
safety of detachment. It looks directly at the present, at a world
that is ours — confused, fearful, angry, and uncertain. Lapid’s
camera does not accuse from a moral height but looks from within. The
closeness is physical, moral, and emotional. We are never allowed to
forget that we are all part of the same human fabric.
In
essence, the film tells the story of what happens when a nation of
victims begins to lose its humanity. It shows, with a slow, burning
clarity, that pain and memory have hardened into fanaticism; that
fear and patriotism have been instrumentalized to create the
conditions for inflicting violence and death upon others; and that
people can be led to believe that their victims (some of whom are
simultaneously perpetrators against them) are inhuman. The film thus
shows that the dehumanization of the victim inevitably leads to the
dehumanization of the perpetrator, and this goes for both sides.
The
artist and the regime
Ken
is also a film about collaboration, not only the participation of
politicians or soldiers in the war propaganda and everyday brutal
violence, but the temptation of artists to collaborate with power or
money, all be it for legitimate existential reasons – the
commission at stake here would allow the protagonist musician and his
family to escape the hellhole that their native country has become
for them. Should Y save his own future at the cost of prostituting
himself for a regime he despises? He accepts the commission with
considerable misgivings (a scene in which he literally crawls on the
floor and licks the boots of his patron is quite disturbing) and
writes a song that will make inhumanity seem acceptable, even noble.
Through his case, Lapid thus explores what happens when art ceases to
resist and begins to serve. When talent, sensitivity, and imagination
become tools of propaganda, they lose their soul. The film asks,
quietly but insistently: at what point does survival become
complicity?
This
question will feel painfully familiar to readers of Britské
listy. Under the
Czechoslovak communist regime, many faced a trap that was morally
resonant: the subtle, everyday compromise of conscience; the
professional routine humiliation required to stay afloat or protect
one’s family. Some collaborated out of fear, others out of
ambition, and others yet out of conviction that they were helping
something larger or safer. Lapid’s film touches the same wound,
though in a different, more dramatic landscape of life and death: the
loss of integrity under pressure, the corrosion of truth by
necessity.
An
explicit and praiseworthy refusal of competitive martyrdom
And
yet Ken
does not erase the other horror, the one that seems to have swallowed
all others: the horror of October 7th. It is there too — the shock,
the pain, the unbearable grief of that day, the collective PTSD state
in which Israel has found itself ever since. Lapid shows that both
truths can coexist, that we must have the courage to face both
horrors at once, to hold them together without denying either. To see
only one is a form of comfort; to see both is an act of conscience.
Among
the film’s most haunting moments is the scene shot on the so-called
“Hill of Love,” the steep but tiny hill overlooking Gaza where,
over the years, numerous Israelis have gathered to watch and cheer
during bombardments. Lapid’s crew had no permission to film there,
but they went anyway. The scene they brought back is haunting. From
that hill, Gaza appears as a fragile line on the horizon, veiled in
smoke, punctuated by the low, rhythmic thud of explosions. The image
is strangely quiet yet filled with unspeakable violence. It captures,
with terrible simplicity, the intimacy of distance — how near one
can be to suffering and death and still look away. As Lapid confessed
at the Q&A, he doesn’t even know if this level of bombing was
exceptional or an everyday occurrence. How could he? This area is
closed.
Lapid
also explained that when they were filming that sequence, the army
arrived and tried to chase them away. He asked his crew waiting at
the bottom of the hill to delay the soldiers as long as possible. By
some amusing twist, the officer who came to enforce the order turned
out to be fascinated by filmmaking, particularly by the art of camera
placement. The crew seized this opportunity and began giving him an
impromptu lesson in cinematography that lasted for hours — long
enough for Lapid to finish shooting the scene uphill. The story is
somewhat absurd, but it contains a strange tenderness: a fleeting
moment when curiosity triumphed over authority, and when art managed
to outlast power, if only for a few minutes.
The
cost of conscience
The
screening at the Viennale was a quiet success. The cinema was almost
full, even though it was in the middle of a workday, and the audience
listened to Lapid with healthy curiosity and respect. I was proud of
Vienna once again — proud that the film was met not with outrage or
defensiveness but with thoughtfulness and empathy.
Lapid
said that Ken
was shown once in Jerusalem. “So, it was possible,” he said, with
a faint, weary smile – only two people tried to interrupt the
screening back there. I’m not surprised: I’m willing to bet there
are many moderate Israelis who just don’t have enough of a voice at
present. Yet Lapid fears it may be his last film. There is no
distributor for the film in Israel, and he doubts that he will ever
again find financial support for his films. He made Ken
knowing that it might end his career. That knowledge lends every
frame a rare moral weight: it is the work of a man who has chosen
truth over safety.
What
Lapid depicted touched me also because I have several Israeli friends
who, like the main character and his family, have emigrated or are
tempted to do so because they can no longer bear to be part of what
they now feel is a nation of perpetrators. Their pain is conflicted —
a mixture of love, guilt, and despair. They are torn between
belonging and moral exile, between loyalty and conscience. This cuts
close to the historical bone, especially when one remembers that the
modern state of Israel was created by people who fled other countries
for precisely the same reason: because they could not bear to remain
part of a system of persecution. Now, tragically, we are witnessing a
certain historical reversal.
Yes
to humanity
Although
Ken
grows from the soil of the Israeli present, it speaks far beyond it.
It is a meditation on the universal mechanisms of moral collapse —
on how easily ideals turn into ideology and violence, how quickly
fear breeds obedience, how the instinct for safety becomes the
justification for cruelty. Its world is not distant from ours. The
same patterns of collaboration, self-censorship, and moral fatigue
can be recognized in every society that begins to lose its center.
Ken
is not a comfortable film, nor is it meant to be. It is not a call to
despair, but to lucidity. It insists on looking straight at the
wound. It asks us to feel when it would be easier to remain numb. It
speaks not only about Israel and Gaza, but about the fragility of
moral clarity everywhere — about the everyday struggle to remain
human when fear and ideology demand obedience and conformity.
I
left the cinema shaken, moved, and silent, filled with admiration for
a filmmaker who continues to speak when it would be so much easier,
and safer, to remain quiet. I am grateful that such a film exists,
and that, against all odds, it was made at all.
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