Would You Have Sex With an Arab?

The aim of exploring a society through the prism of intimacy is nothing new in the cinema of Yolande Zauberman. It has even been a constant since her first feature, Classified People (1987), filmed in South Africa. This time the filmmaker focuses on a more insidious form of apartheid by questioning Israelis from both the Jewish majority and Arab minority (one in five Israelis) on whether they could envisage having a relationship with someone from outside their community. A question that echoes the question of the film’s title, or its corollary, “would you have sex with an Israeli Jew?”…
Like the “are you happy?” used by Marceline Loridan to question passers-by in Paris in her Chronique d’un été, Yolande Zauberman’s indiscreet question takes the night-owls by surprise. More than a directly political question would have done, she forces them to very clearly reveal something of themselves – if only through what suddenly appears in their eyes or body language…The conflict that most of us, French spectators, know only in rather abstract terms is suddenly fleshed out in the stories that the respondents confide to the camera.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian, septembre 2012, Critikat.com