In December 2017, 16-year-old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was videotaped slapping and punching two armed Israeli soldiers during a heated protest outside her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Salih. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested and sentenced to eight months in prison. Around that time, Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Israel's legislature, tweeted that he wished the teenager had "gotten a bullet, at least in the kneecap. That would have put her under house arrest for the rest of her life."
The fallout from that furious confrontation has inspired the title of a furious and confrontational new drama called "Ahed's Knee." But the movie, somehow both as hard as bone and as flexible as a joint, is not really about Tamimi. Nor does it show much interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond a reference to this particular skirmish. Its protagonist is a middle-age Israeli writer-director known as Y (a superb Avshalom Pollak), who is clearly meant to be a fictional stand-in for the movie's own middle-age Israeli writer-director, Nadav Lapid. Y is planning to film a video installation based on Tamimi's ordeal, but it's his own experience that comes under this movie's forceful scrutiny.
This isn't the first time Lapid has drawn inspiration from his own life, as he did in his 2019 stunner, "Synonyms." Nor is it the first time he has directed a blast of cinematic outrage at what he perceives to be the pervasive moral complacency and intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Israeli society. His critique here takes the form of a journey into the Arava, a stretch of desert in southern Israel, where Y will attend a screening of one of his movies at a small-town library. Touching down on this arid, beautiful landscape, Y receives a warm welcome from Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a friendly young woman who works for the Ministry of Culture and who will serve as his host, dramatic foil and moral quandary.
