Is there still an appetite for Israeli spy stories?
Two productions arriving in the United States this month are testing that question: Checkout, a dark Israeli comedy about an aging Mossad operative, and the fifth season of Fauda, the Israeli action thriller about undercover counterterrorism agents.
One is an indie film that spent years getting to the screen; the other is a global Netflix hit whose new season plunges directly into the trauma of the October 7 massacre.
The two projects are seeking audiences in a challenging climate. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March found that 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel, compared with 37% who viewed the country favorably. And Israeli cultural exports have faced increasing scrutiny abroad over the country’s conduct since October 7.
Yet Fauda has returned to Netflix with considerable international attention, while Checkout opened in Manhattan to a sold-out audience.
“It’s hard for Israeli movies right now to find an audience because everything translates to, you know, the ‘P’ [Palestinian] problem,” Jonathan Dekel, the writer, director and executive producer of Checkout, said in an interview. “It’s problematic.”
Checkout premieres to sold-out theater
Checkout opened September 17 to a sold-out audience at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village, which Dekel described as a “stalwart of indie cinema.”
Dekel has said the film’s six-year production was almost as difficult as the journey of its protagonist. They shot in Ukraine in November 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and barely escaped with the film’s hard drive after the set was bombed when Russia invaded. They had just finished editing when October 7, 2023, arrived, and Dekel was called up for military service.
Dekel knew that the movie would debut in a world transformed by the war and its aftermath.
“Trying to find a good time to put out a movie, a satire - a dark comedy about the Israeli special forces - was very, very touch and go until we finally decided to go for it,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Checkout is not a conventional spy thriller. Its protagonist, Dov, is an American-born New Yorker who moved to Israel and is now about to retire from the Mossad.
“The day he checks out of his hotel to retire, someone else checks in, and it turns out it’s Mossad’s number one target - an arch terrorist [code-]named Gilgamesh,” Dekel said. “The entire movie is this weird weekend in a hotel where these two middle-aged men, spy-versus-spy, try to figure out who they are. They’re trying to find out about each other, but they find themselves.”
Josh Pais, who plays Dov, said his character is a man searching for meaning in his life - and comes to believe he can find it by tracking down and stopping a terrorist.
“He is possibly stepping into delusion,” said Pais. “What was appealing to me was that this is a story of what really happens to spies. So many movies tap into, you know, the James Bond of being a spy. Those movies are awesome, but this movie is about what it’s really like to be sent to a distant land, to be on location and to pretend that you’re someone else. Over a certain amount of time these guys start to lose touch with reality because, in truth, the vast majority of time as a spy nothing happens.”
Shai Satran, the movie’s co-writer, said he believes this is the “perfect moment for a movie about the Israeli intelligence community and an operation gone bad.”
“His driving force is not really to catch that guy - he doesn’t care about that guy. The driving force is to be accepted by his peers, the people who sent him - that’s at the core,” said Satran. “I don’t want to be crude about this, but there was something pre-October 7 about the Israeli security forces, maybe the special forces: There’s a certain arrogance in being only worried about your peers and not being aware of” the wider mission. In the lead-up to the Hamas attacks of October 7, “Israel, in a sense, thought that they were more in control of the situation than they were,” he said
Fauda's international success rewarded with fifth season
That idea - of intelligence work as something more complicated than heroic missions and exotic adventures - also runs through Fauda, though in a much more conventional action-thriller format.
The Israeli series has been an international success since its Netflix debut in 2016, and its fifth season, which arrived on Netflix September 8, is now testing whether audiences will follow its characters into a story shaped directly by and set two years after October 7.
Lior Raz, the show’s creator, co-writer and star, said last month at a fundraiser in Lenox, Massachusetts, for Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency service that he was genuinely surprised by the show’s reception in unlikely places: Previous seasons of the show hit No. 1 in popularity in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, and it was No. 2 in Qatar.
Season four ran in 2022 in Israel and early the next year on Netflix. The show’s creators had originally begun writing a different fifth season. But after the October 7 Hamas attack, Raz said those scripts were discarded. The new season deals directly with the aftermath of the attack and what Raz described as the nature of revenge. One reviewer called it “gripping, emotionally exhausting and often deeply difficult to watch,” particularly because of its depiction, in flashbacks, of October 7.
Raz, in his MDA talk, said the backlash against Israel was a campaign orchestrated by radical activists and Israel’s enemies. The latest season of Fauda is in part an attempt to depict the Israeli perspective for those open to nuance. “I want them to look in my character’s eyes, and to see what we felt on those days,” he told the New York Times. “If it would happen in their countries, they would feel exactly like we felt and how we feel about the world. So I hope it would open people’s eyes to see what happened on October 7.”
Although its reception abroad is hard to gauge, the latest season was a hit in Israel: The Times reported that it had already been the most-watched season of any show in the history of Israel’s Yes network.
Lacking the backing of a streaming giant, Checkout will have to work harder to find an audience. The Sundance Screenwriters Lab supported the Checkout script, Dekel said, but that was before October 7. Since then, “finding a distributor, finding a Netflix, Amazon or Hulu was pretty much crickets [silence] all over. It might be our movie, but looking around [at] movies from my colleagues - Israelis - I think it’s pretty much a broad phenomenon.”
Asked if he believed the difficulty he faced was because it is an Israeli movie or because it involved Jews, Dekel replied, “Is there a difference?”