Prizewinning film, The Future, by Noam Kaplan

 The Future, written and directed by Noam Kaplan, was a prizewinner at the Tribeca Fim Festival, June 2023. 

Noam Kaplan’s previous feature film, Manpower, was about migrant workers living in South Tel Aviv. Check out what I wrote about it on this blog.

His new film, The Future, is a provocative film about women, about the Occupation, and about our future, here in Israel-Palestine.

A Palestinian young woman named Yaffa has been arrested for the assassination of the Minister of Space and Tourism. In fact, in the opening scene, Yaffa (played by a Palestinian actress named Samar Qupty) is brought by a police investigator to re-enact the scene in which she shot and killed the minister.  Later, the Security Services bring her to the clinic of Nurit (played by Reymonde Amsallem), a futuristic profiler who can supposedly identify potential terrorists and thereby prevent terrorist incidents. Since Nurit didn’t succeed in foretelling Yaffa’s attack on the minister, she is meant to interrogate her in order to better understand what went wrong. 

In her series of meetings with Yaffa, she tries to delve into what kind of relationship she had with her mother, what kind of childhood she had, what motivated her to acquire a gun and to decide to assassinate the minister.  At the same time, she is learning a lot about herself, about her relationship with her own mother and about her desire to have a child.

All of this is told on the background of the entire country waiting to learn of the success of an Israeli spaceship named “The Hope” on its way to the moon. 

Highly critical of the Occupation, The Future offers a shocking look at our future.  Can there be any hope? The film is available from GumFilms.