We discovered Hadas Ben Aroya in France in 2018, with the release of his graduation film, People That Are Not Me. Shamelessness, egotism, urban spleen: far from the committed cinema of the 2000s, a new Israeli tone emanated from this film. A pop melancholy, an intimate and disaffected gesture at the same time. This lively thirty-year-old became ipso facto the standard-bearer of a generation in search of identity. Confirmation today with his second feature film, All Eyes Off Mewhich outperforms on all counts.
This film confirms your taste for nudity, feelings and bodies. What is at stake?
Nudity places the viewer in front of a conflict. On the one hand, the shamelessness of nudity, the embarrassment or shame associated with it. On the other hand, its place in the arts, as an aesthetic object. It is this conflict that interests me. I like the idea that the viewer can move from their positions while watching the film. Otherwise, it does not interest me as a spectator. The nudity creates embarrassment at the start, but the length of the shots and the scenes of nudity will somehow force him to enter it, to see something else. There is a requirement of authenticity which is very important to me. In language, for example, but also in the representation of bodies. I show the bodies as they are, in their imperfection as in their beauty. Above all, I am not trying to magnify them.
This second film, less narrative, less psychological, more conceptual in a certain sense, goes towards radicality…
The heroine in my first film knew what she wanted, but didn’t act on it to get it. The heroine of this one doesn’t even know what she wants or what she feels and talks and acts to find out. It’s a little scary, because there is no longer a causal relationship between thought, actions, and their consequences. The characters in this movie are totally unreadable. In this sense, the film is more radical and more abstract, but at the same time it could not be more concrete, because the staging deprives the viewer of the keys that would allow him to clearly understand the reasons of the characters.
Does this state of loss of youth in your film define that of your generation?
I think there was a before and an after Oslo [les accords signés en 1993 entre Israéliens et Palestiniens en vue de résoudre le conflit] in the country. What followed, and which hit my generation hard, was like an immense resignation. The simple injunction to have to think about our political situation has become a burden. The youth of my country, it seems to me, have become both indifferent to everything and for this very reason in a feeling of almost permanent violence.
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