Avanti Popolo

Avanti Popolo, Rafi Bukai’s 1986 film, is a landmark of Israeli cinema about war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Rather than presenting the Six-Day War as a straightforward national victory, it follows two Egyptian soldiers wandering through the Sinai Desert and trying simply to get home. Their absurd, comic and tragic journey dismantles familiar images of the enemy, the fighter and the Israeli hero, offering an unusually human perspective on people caught on opposite sides of a war.

The title is taken from Bandiera Rossa, the Italian Communist anthem known in English as “The Red Flag.” Its meaning is commonly rendered as “Forward, the People.” The title itself suggests the tension between grand ideological language and the confused, improvised and intensely ordinary reality inhabited by the film’s characters.

A journey through the aftermath of war

The story takes place at the end of the Six-Day War, in June 1967. Two Egyptian privates, disoriented and nearly without hope, are lost in the Sinai and trying to reach the Suez Canal and return home. Along the way they find a dead United Nations soldier beside a jeep containing bottles of whisky. They drink to relieve their thirst, become intoxicated and later encounter an Israeli military patrol, with which they travel for part of their surreal odyssey.

These encounters turn a struggle for survival into a sequence of farcical and dreamlike situations. The boundaries between victors and defeated, enemies and companions, and reality and fantasy begin to dissolve. Through humor and absurdity, the film conveys the helplessness of soldiers swept along by historical events larger than themselves.

Breaking the heroic national myth

Avanti Popolo belongs to the critical wave of Israeli cinema that questioned established national narratives. Its challenge to war mythology is not delivered only through direct political criticism; it also comes through the way the film represents soldiers. They are not flawless heroes or national symbols, but tired, vulnerable and limited human beings. The Israeli reservists are equally distant from the familiar image of the brave, upright and handsome sabra: they are clumsy, undisciplined and at times violent or indifferent.

The decision to place an Egyptian soldier at the center of the narrative was especially significant in Israeli cinema of the period. The Egyptian soldier has a name, a face and an identity. He is not merely “the enemy,” but a person with fears, memories, sensitivity and a capacity to care for others. The film therefore asks Israeli viewers to see the war from the perspective of someone on the other side, without reducing its meaning to a single political statement.

The film sharply reverses familiar stereotypes. The Egyptian character appears humane, sensitive and intellectual, while the Israeli characters stand far from the ideal of masculine heroism. The use of cultural references associated with Jewish as well as wider literary traditions, including the Egyptian character’s engagement with Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, complicates the question of identity. Avanti Popolo does not simply exchange the roles of Israeli and Arab; it examines how Israeli cinema imagines the other, and how even an attempt to humanize that other may remain shaped by a Jewish and Israeli point of view.

From student project to feature film

The film began as a graduation project at Tel Aviv University and gradually developed into a full-length feature. Its improvised beginnings are captured in the account of Rafi Bukai on the eve of the first day of shooting: his apartment was filled with old film stock, army uniforms, weapons, communications equipment and props, while he still had no idea that the student project would become, after two more difficult years, a successful feature film. The story highlights the distance between the modest conditions of production and the film’s eventual place in Israeli culture.

Avanti Popolo received strong reviews in Israel and abroad, screened at festivals around the world and won international awards. In 2013, it was ranked first in Nrg Ma’ariv’s project “The 50 Greatest Israeli Films in History.” Its importance rests not only on its reception at the time of release, but also on its continuing value as a reference point for discussions of Israeli cinema, the memory of war and the ways a society tells its own story.

Why Avanti Popolo belongs in Moreshet

Avanti Popolo merits inclusion in Moreshet because it documents a decisive moment in Israeli culture and demonstrates how art can change the way war, identity and memory are viewed. The film gave the Egyptian soldier a complex human presence, challenged the image of the Israeli soldier as a one-dimensional national hero and used humor and absurdity to confront collective trauma and the reality of conflict.

Its lasting influence lies in the questions it enables generations of viewers, scholars and filmmakers to ask about cinema, nationalism and the representation of the other. It also preserves evidence of a period when Israeli cinema began dismantling central myths and making room for experiences that had not stood at the center of the official story. For these reasons, and because of its continuing place in Israeli film culture, Avanti Popolo is a natural subject for Moreshet.com.