Cinéfondation Atelier: Nadav Lapid – “The Policeman”

Nadav Lapid, a filmmaker from Israel, is looking for additional funding for his project The Policeman, one of the 15 projects selected for the Cinefondation Atelier this year. He was previously caught up in the world of literature; he published a prize-winning novel in Israel in 2001, and also worked as a journalist. Nadav shared further what brought him to filmmaking, “My father is an author and my mother is a film editor so in a very un-radical way without noticing it, I followed in their footsteps.”

Nadav has bathed in the support of the Cannes Festival since his first film:
“I studied cinema; the first thing I shot – in my life – was an experimental fiction-documentary of three minutes that participated in Border Project which united five short films, and was screened in the Cinéfondation in 2004. In 2005 I made a short film that was entitled Road that went to Berlin and Locarno, and then in 2006, I screened my graduation film in the Cinéfondation program, Emile’s Girlfriend, that was later commercially distributed in cinemas in France and Israel.”

He was then selected for the Cannes Residence program where he developed the script for the project he is presently pitching in Cannes. Nadav added, “It’s a kind of gradual progression or something like this… It’s an extremely competitive country [Israel]; people are hard…and sometimes when I come to Cannes, I feel that I can breathe better. It’s very intense here; there’s something in this international space that permits you to have another perspective regarding your home country… And something in Cannes gives you the mark that maybe if it looks strange, it has a kind of importance and for me that’s essential. For me I think it’s something that permits me to work. I couldn’t do it without the help of Cannes.”