How are you doing today? How's Paris?
Paris is great. I'm looking forward to the holidays. I'm gonna go to the south of France. I think I'm gonna do my summer dream south of France thing for the first time ever.
Oh my god, amazing. I've never been.
Yeah, me neither.
Well let's just jump right into it and talk about your film. I know that it's based on some personal aspects, but can you tell us a little bit more of what it's about?
Definitely. So, Arava is the story of two runaway teens in Jerusalem who are in and out of religious frameworks. They're searching for belonging, for identity, and for the true story between one another. They are two best friends and there is some romantic kind of love that is buried underneath their friendship. I think the story is also about discovering that.
I also know that you're from Jerusalem. Is Arava similar to what it was like for you growing up?
I grew up in Jerusalem in the early 2000s and for me, Jerusalem was a strange place to grow up because there's so many ideologies and so many different kinds of groups living away from each other. I left my home and school when I was 12 and I found the punk scene. At the time it was made up of people of all kinds of ages and backgrounds who were either facing homelessness or didn't want to return to their homes for many different reasons. Usually the reasons would be their ways of being didn't really fit ideologies at home. Communities that didn't accept them. You always see those kids when you grew up in Jerusalem. I was 12 when I first approached a group of kids that were a little bit older than me and I didn't really have a space in my own community I felt at the time. I found myself within a couple of months just hanging out in that scene and living in the squads, hitchhiking, and stuff. And it stayed that way for a couple of years.
Wow, you did that at 12?
Yeah, 12, I guess 13 was when I officially left home. It was interesting too because I came from an Orthodox family, but I didn't leave because the Orthodox background was pushing me out. It was actually kind of the opposite. My family specifically and the specific Orthodox dynasty that I’m a part of, are very accepting and they were always like, "You can come back with a mohawk and tattoos." But at the same time, my living environment and my family had a lot going on and I left that community. The film touches on that journey of a young person trying to find out more about the relationship between religion and faith.
So this movie is sort of a sneak peek glimpse into what it was actually like for you.
It was my personal story, but also a bit of the mosaic of punk culture. It was a big thing in the '90s and the early 2000s for us. Now it's kind of gone.
What was it like?
It was mostly punk music in Hebrew and Arabic. Everything was very improvised, very DIY. Sometimes there were not even real instruments, but it was hundreds of kids from really different backgrounds that would get together in abandoned buildings. They would throw these crazy raves. People were living in the squads and your whole life revolved around it — nothing else that mattered. No one was really going to school or were part of mainstream society in any way.