2019-06-20

SIFF MasterClass │ Nadav Lapid: Everyone Is a Window for Seeing Life

Nadav Lapid is a famous Israeli director and scriptwriter, and is one of the most concerned young directors at the moment. In 2011, his feature film debut POLICEMAN won the special jury prize of the 64th Locarno International Film Festival. In 2014, the second feature film THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER was launched and was shortlisted for Critics\' Week of Cannes International Film Festival. In 2015, the film WHY was nominated for the best short film at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. In 2019, his third feature film SYNONYMS won the Golden Bear Award for Best Film at the 69th Berlin Film Festival. On June 19th, Nadav Lapid was invited by the 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival to be a guest of "Film School" with his latest short film FROM THE DIARY OF A WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER to share his film concepts and creation ideas with Chinese audiences.

An Autobiography and Also the Life of Everyone

Nadav Lapid\'s award-winning work SYNONYMES is a story about "identity": An Israeli young man fled to Paris, and he tried to get rid of his "Israel" identity to become complete "French". Therefore, he insisted on not speaking any Hebrew word, but his French was poor, so he could only communicate with others through a bilingual dictionary.

Lapid himself was born in Israel in 1975 and migrated to France 20 years ago. This experience was exactly the same as the leading actor of SYNONYMES. In this regard, Lapid made no secret, and many of his films were inspired by his own life, including SYNONYMES. "Film is not necessarily a duplication of my life, but it is closely related to my life experience. I don\'t just write autobiography in film, but hope to talk about social issues in film by showing different aspects of life. I believe that everyone is a window through which we can see all kinds of existences in life."

SYNONYMES also made Lapid the first Israeli director who won the Golden Bear Award at Berlin Film Festival, and the film also received the highest score of 3.0 in the on-site publication. Some film critics believed that the favor of SYNONYMES was closely related to the current refugee crisis in Germany. Lapid himself said "I am not sure about this", "but first, this film still touched the audience and judges at Berlin Film Festival. It is not easy for the person of a culture to survive in another culture. Who are we? What can we do? This is the question I want to raise in film. There is no unified answer to this. The audiences can think a lot in combination with their own experiences and their own cognition."

Dare to Fight Against Being One\'s Own Prisoner

So far, Lapid has already made three feature films all of which have achieved great success. In his view, although the three films had different themes, they all show the protagonist\'s self struggle. "For example, in THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER, the kindergarten teacher\'s husband always watched soap operas every day, but the teacher had certain spiritual pursuit and could not accept such a life; Like in the SYNONYMES, the protagonist hoped to live a life he desired after escaping from Israel to Paris, but had to face the language barrier problem. In order to pursue the so-called desired life, they gradually became their own enemies in the passage of time." Lapid said that we must dare to fight against the world and fight against ourselves. Otherwise, everyone will become their own prisoner."

"The gap between reality and dream" Lapid tried to express in the film deeply touched the audiences on site. One audience expressed its feelings after watching FROM THE DIARY OF A WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER: "I see that people want to define themselves, define marriage, define children, and define job search through wedding. People do all these things in order to define themselves. So why we can say these people are alive, because they express that they are alive by defining these rules and regulations."

Lapid agreed: "When everyone defines themselves, they will see the contradiction between reality and imagination, and it is the universal existence of such contradiction that makes our films wonderful and touching."

Give Audience a Chance to Live a Life of Others

For the most curious casting question of audiences, Lapid revealed that when he filmed SYNONYMES, he originally thought of playing the leading actor himself. "But I am not good at acting, and I have already reached middle age, thus the image is also not right, so I can\'t play the role." When Lapid looked for an actor according to the image of leading actor he envisioned, he found the whole process was very painful. Suddenly, one day, he met the current leading actor and saw a completely different way of deduction in him, he then realized that "If this film is related to your personal experience, you must find a completely different deduction way from yours, and you have to give the actors and audiences a chance to experience the life of others. This is the ultimate charm of films."