The Bubble

With The Bubble, director Eytan Fox and his screenwriting (and life) partner Gal Uchovsky continue their extraordinary run of sleek, chic films that define the contradictions of modern Israeli life. Like their previous hits Walk on Water, Yossi and Jagger and the watershed television series Florentine (a record-breaking SFJFF favorite in 1998), The Bubble weaves together the lives of likable young characters of various exuberant sexualities into a storyline that raises issues far more complex than the characters seem prepared to handle. In The Bubble, a trio of charming and sexy Israeli twenty-somethings share a flat in Tel Aviv’s hip district, Shenkin Street. Idealistic Lulu works at The Body Shop, goofy and flamboyant Yali runs a cafe, and moody Noam works in a record store when he’s not doing dispiriting reserve duty at a Palestinian checkpoint. They love their carefree lives inside Tel Aviv’s “bubble,” where the strains of a violent outside world are kept at bay, one day (and party-filled night) at a time. But the bubble is threatened to the bursting point when Noam hooks up with and gradually falls in love with Ashraf, a young Palestinian man who cannot legally work or reside in Tel Aviv. Seeing Ashraf’s situation as a chance to act on their principles of peaceful coexistence, the three roommates turn somersaults to squeeze Ashraf into the bubble. How their ideals run headlong into tragic realities forms the core tension in this smart, keenly felt drama.

Eytan Fox was born in New York City and came to Israel as a child. He grew up in Jerusalem and after serving in the Army, studied in Tel Aviv University's school of Film and Television. His first film Time Off, a 50-minute drame about sexual identity in the Israeli Army (SF JFF), won 1990 Movie of the Year award from the Israeli Film Institute and many international prizes, among them First prize in Munich's International Student Film Festival. His first feature film Song of the Siren (SF JFF), a romantic comedy about life in Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War, was Israel's biggest box-office success in 1994. Over the past two years, Fox has created and directed Florentene, a dramatic series for Israeli Television that examines the life of young people in urban Israel against the background of Rabin's assasination. The series won First Prize in the Televiaion category of the 1997 Jerusalem International Film Festival. Eytan Fox is currently working on a script for his first English-speaking film, tentatively entitled 1967.