![]() ![]() Once we help them overcome those terrible problems, then we can come in as their neighbors and say, 'Why are you behaving this way toward gay men?' " "But they have crucial, bigger problems to deal with now. "People ask me what I think about the Arabs being so homophobic, and it's disturbing," Fox says. If his unorthodox approach made it harder to get film funding, Fox seems used to challenges - such as persuading the head of a Palestinian village to let him shoot there. I am a very political person, but I also care about where I drink my coffee and the music I listen to and the films I go to and my yuppie lifestyle in Tel Aviv. "But I thought, 'I can't make that heavy, black-and-white, dreary political film because that wouldn't be true to my life. When he was a film student, there was a firm line between television - "fluffy genre things and romantic comedies" - and film, "which had to be heavy and political, no humor or fun, no beautiful women and handsome men," Fox says. Our whole relationship with our neighbors is the most crucial thing in our lives and, if you're an idealist or a filmmaker who cares about what's going on, it's the issue to constantly try to figure out and try to make people react and try to change our tragic reality." After my mom's death I thought, 'I want to continue with her struggle and beliefs.' Plus, I live in Israel. Some of the scenes - such as the one where a mother goes up against the neighborhood committee and tries to open a Jewish playground to Palestinian children - are "completely biographical. Part of her job was to study the poor Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and help them build and deal with all the crazy laws of what they're allowed and not allowed to build, including this village that was opposite the posh neighborhood where I grew up, which is prominent in the film." "She was a city planner, a member of the Jerusalem council and elected as part of the left-wing liberal party Meritz. "She was an American Jewish lady who moved with her husband and three children to Israel in the mid '60s, and after the initial shock - Jerusalem was such a little provincial nothing of a town back then, and my mother came from Manhattan and really liked the life there - she really decided to become Israeli and was very involved," Fox says. What had the biggest effect on the latest one was personal, not political. The real stars, though, are masculinity, in all its many varied permutations, and Israel, a country for which Fox says he has "a deep love. You can't move far in a Fox film without stumbling over some kind of conflict: between love and war, public duty and private desire, explosive sex and exploding people. ![]() ![]() It also deals with the reluctance of one of them to come out - a theme taken up in Fox's "Walk on Water" (2004), his most successful internationally, in which a heterosexual Mossad agent falls for the grandson of a Nazi war criminal. It features a memorable scene where they tenderly josh that they'll still love each other if their legs get blown off since that would make certain sexual positions more convenient. That was Fox's 2002 film about two male soldiers on the Lebanese border who fall in love. "And the army is showing 'Yossi & Jagger' to soldiers now, so that's good." I don't know if in Israeli commando units you have a lot of people going around bragging about the fact that they're gay, but it's a lot more easygoing," Fox says. It's quite a different take from the U.S. I don't think armies or the war situation is good, but if that's the case, everyone should participate." They'll say, 'We don't care if you're gay. Because it's the army of the people, everybody has to go. "Yes, it was hell," he says, "but every Israeli man has his war, and I don't know what's better, to be part of this Intifada thing and become a policeman of civilians or going to war with an enemy that is clear and its soldiers. It didn't stop him having to do military service when he turned 18, which coincided with the first Israeli-Lebanese war. Fox, 43, born in New York, moved to Israel at age 2 and has known he was gay for as long as he can remember.
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