A ‘sci-fi documentary’ dreaming of peace got banned in Israel. Why?
‘Lyd’ follows turmoil in the controversial city, but also imagines an alternate, peaceful reality
The wormhole to an alternate reality of peace in the Middle East. Courtesy of Lyd in Exile
By Mira Fox November 11, 2024
Lyd is not a very traditional documentary. Sure, there are interviews and talking heads, a bit of archival footage, and some explanations of history.
But in the film, which follows the story of the eponymous Palestinian city — now the Israeli city of Lod — spends little time explaining the past. Instead, in sequences that mix present reality and an imagined world, the city herself speaks, remembering all of her past selves and dreaming of a peaceful world.
“I never promised anyone anything,” she says of the battle between Palestinians and Israelis to define the city’s identity.
Narrating in Arabic, the city recalls centuries of history and the many names she’s held. She’s proud of housing a train station and airport that connected Palestinians to the rest of the world, and receiving Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and pogroms. But then she gets to the establishment of the state of Israel, and the expulsion of Arab residents that Palestinians call the Nakba.
“Have you ever heard the theory that every event has multiple possible outcomes?” she says over an aerial view of the city. “The event that happened right down here was so shocking that it didn’t only create an alternate reality — it also ruptured reality.”
The film’s site calls it a “sci-fi documentary,” taking the viewer through an animated wormhole into a different Lyd. Here, Muslims and Jews, Druze and Christians learn together in the same schools, where they have classes on the Holocaust and St. George, the patron saint of the city who all faiths gather to celebrate. Here, instead of expelling Palestinians to make way for an Israeli state, Jews simply joined them. The society is so successful that the school has lessons on “Palestinian privilege” — which applies to Jews, Muslims, Druze and Christians alike — and how they can extend the wealth to new asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan.
Even the film’s directing team, composed of Palestinian Israeli citizen Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland, an American Jew, speaks to its dream of peaceful coexistence. And yet when a theater in Jaffa attempted to screen it in early October, police shut it down. Shortly thereafter, Israeli minister of culture Miki Zohar banned the film.
“His official rationale was that he didn’t want to incite violence in mixed cities,” Younis told me when we spoke over the phone. “It’s a very dumb idea, because who the hell watches documentaries and uses them to incite?”
Lyd is far from the first film to be censored in Israel; the documentary Jenin, Jenin, which shows the Palestinian story of a controversial massacre in the West Bank city of Jenin, has been banned in Israel since its premiere in 2002. And Israelism, a 2023 documentary about how most Jews in the U.S. are taught about Israel, met with extensive controversy when the directors — both of whom are Jewish — screened the film on American college campuses in the wake of Oct. 7.
But unlike those films, Lyd is a fundamentally optimistic project. (It’s also currently on tour in the U.S., screening at numerous American colleges where, unlike Israelism, the showings have been taking place without issue.) Yet in Israel, the crackdown has been intense.
Younis said he is no stranger to smear campaigns. He is a well-known figure in Israel’s Arab culture scene — he had a talk show on Arabic-language TV and has organized multiple film festivals. “There are right wing activists who have been after me and whatever I do,” he said. “It’s about not wanting to give people like me a voice anymore.”
And, Friedland added, “A lot of people conveniently left out that an American Jew was also directing the film.”
Of course, there’s still plenty of controversy in Lyd’s ideas, regardless of its directing team. There’s archival footage of Israeli Palmach soldiers recalling, and regretting, the violence against and expulsion of Palestinians from Lyd during the establishment of Israel, and modern footage of Israeli soldiers cracking down on Lyd’s current Arab citizens. And, of course, the country where everyone is living so peacefully is called Palestine, not Israel, and it’s not a Jewish state. Even the fact that the name of the city is the Arabic Lyd, not the Israeli Lod, is a weighted choice.
Yet numerous Israeli organizations are protesting what they see as government censorship of the film. Younis said that around 15 filmmakers’ and writers’ organizations — “pretty mainstream organizations,” he said — wrote letters to a judge who oversees the government’s decisions, asking her to revoke the ban on Lyd. And Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, wrote an editorial castigating the decision to ban the film.
“A long list of Israeli films are shown every year in the movie theaters without receiving approval from the Israel Film Council,” the editorial said, noting that the only films police shut down were from Palestinians. “This is what political persecution looks like.”
“I’m quite surprised that we’ve been getting somewhat of a positive coverage from some of the Hebrew media,” Younis said. “I guess Israelis are beginning to wake up and realize that this is not going to end well.”
I guess what really scares them,” Younis told me, “is just the audacity of a Jewish American and a Palestinian from Israel to dream of a world in which everyone is free from the river to the sea.”
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