Nadav Lapid: Israel's 'philosophical' filmmaker who has stirred up a storm

Reacting to the backlash for his remarks about The Kashmir Files, Lapid says making bad films is not a crime, but the film is 'crude, manipulative and violent'

When I last saw Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, I was with a group of cinema students listening to his Q&A session at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. Lapid was speaking about his film Synonyms (2011), an autobiographical movie about a young man who forsakes his Israeli identity for a French one. The film is one of Lapid’s most acclaimed works and presents a sometimes-humorous, sometimes-disturbing portrait of conflicted Jewish identities outside Israel.

I remember we were all feeling quite hungry and had left the session midway. We didn’t get a chance to meet him. We, however, managed to watch