Michael Moshe Dahan is an Israeli-American filmmaker, artist, and scholar who earned his MFA in Studio Art with a Critical Theory Emphasis from UC Irvine. After a decade behind the scenes as a film executive, he’s now pushing boundaries at the intersection of experimental film and deep critical inquiry. His work is fearless, interrogating both personal and political terrain while questioning how we construct and perform identity.
Michael’s film Two Points of Failure featured at international festivals like Rotterdam and Tribeca, and his most ambitious project, YES REPEAT NO arrived on major platforms and DVD on November 11, 2025. In this feature, he explores how memory, conflict, and inherited trauma shape generations, asking tough questions about the legacies of the Nakba and our collective search for healing. His approach, which blurs the lines between cinema and conceptual art, could really resonate with your audience craving unfiltered stories and big, messy ideas.
EM had the chance to interview Dahan prior to the premiere.
Your work often merges philosophy and cinema. How does your background in Critical Theory inform the way you approach storytelling?
I am interested in making work that engages with the current conditions of what it means to be alive in the world today, and how life is shaped by power structures (be they social, political or economic). This applies to my work as an artist, a filmmaker, or as an educator. What is crucial to this kind of work is a recognition that pure critique, from some privileged outsider position, some incorruptible moral high ground, simply is not possible. As a contemporary condition, this kind of work can only be made with a recognition and acknowledgment of one’s complicity in that which is being examined and critiqued. This is what I bring from critical theory– this kind of complicity and bleeding over between the subject who is doing the critique (me), and the object that is being examined for critique. What this means in a more concrete way is that it would be dishonest for me to simply criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people without also admitting my deep emotional attachment to Israel as a place I was born and am from. I recognize the contradictory nature of this kind of viewpoint, but honest analysis cannot always be neutral analysis. The only way to transform society, to expose and challenge ideology and domination, is to also examine one’s own part in maintaining ideology and domination.
After spending years as a film executive, what inspired you to step into directing and creating work that challenges cultural and political narratives?
Well, before I came to Los Angeles, when I was in college, theatre directing was my passion. But I couldn’t figure out how to survive that way. I came to Los Angeles because I also had a love of movies– and that started at a very early age. After college, I spent a decade working for studio-based production companies, on large scale studio films. My last job was as an executive with Mark Gordon and Gary Levinson where I had the honor of being a producer on THE PATRIOT.
One of the things that often frustrated me about big-budget studio films was how little room there was for true complexity– we were always searching for the biggest possible audience for a story and that often meant eliminating contradiction and complexity. That frustration led me to pursue an MFA and then a PhD. Even though I transitioned to graduate school and eventually academia, I still longed to tell stories that connected with audiences. Your output as an academic is seldom read by more than a few hundred– or a few dozen– people. Those two frustrations have led me to a kind of hybrid practice as an artist and a filmmaker; one that seeks to unpack dense theoretical propositions that can be examined in a way that they become accessible to a wider audience. I really do believe that philosophy and theory have an essential role in creative output– and that the last station for deep thought cannot simply be writing academic texts. Deep, nuanced, complex thinking will die on the vine if it isn’t put into practice as creative output. And I firmly believe that history and contemporary political resonances of history link philosophy / theory to a wider audience–it’s hard not to care about how history affects our lived experience now. It’s a school of thinking called ‘Critical Aesthetics’ and was introduced to me by Dr. Juli Carson.
YES REPEAT NO delves into Juliano Mer-Khamis’s layered identity as both Palestinian and Jewish. What drew you to his story as a prism for exploring personal and national identity?
The project itself came about when I was curating a gallery exhibition with Israeli and Palestinian artists about artwork that comes out of intergenerational trauma. I had some outstanding museum-level artists who were interested in participating but neither (Palestinian or Israeli) wanted to show with the other. It was impossible to hold both views in the same exhibition, and as a result the show never happened. The impossibility of that became apparent to me, and one of my mentors reminded me how potentially dangerous it was to occupy this divide. That mentor introduced me to Juliano Mer-Khamis as a historical figure who tried to occupy this fraught and contradictory position and died for it. I started to research Juliano and found a clip of him online in which he predicts, almost tongue-in-cheek, that he would die because a Palestinian would walk up to him and shoot him. And of course, years later this is what actually happened– though the identity of his killer remains unknown, who they were or whether they were Palestinian or Israeli. It was obvious to me, however, at the moment I saw Juliano’s foreshadowing interview that there was a movie to be made about Juliano, because of who he was, what he represented, and how he died.
Yes Repeat No contends with the idea that identity itself is something that is constantly performed, negotiated and often articulated through moment-to-moment self-performance. There are props, gestures, slogans, and beliefs that come with performing one’s identity–whether that’s rooted in nationality, gender, or any of the other ways we identify ourselves as belonging to one group or another. Of course, actors are performers. But I think individuals perform themselves on a daily basis. Juliano was an activist but also an actor and so I was compelled to create a situation where three actors would compete, in a sense, to play Juliano– and would each have to justify which version of Juliano was the most authentic one, the Israeli, the Palestinian, or the public figure that was constantly negotiating between these two versions of himself.
The film was made in collaboration with Palestinian, Israeli, and American artists. What did that collaboration reveal about the possibilities—and limitations—of creative unity?
One of the challenges we faced was acknowledging that we ourselves– the creative team and our cast– did not agree on many of the ideas that we were unravelling in this film. We did not have a singular, coherent point of view– we got into many arguments. We were understanding what the film was in real time, as we were making it. From the beginning, I had conversations with our endlessly talented and creatively flexible cinematographer BJ Strongman that even if we yelled ‘cut’, if we stopped to discuss or argue about something in the script, that he was to keep shooting. This was understood by all of us from the beginning. So, the arguments, the discussions, the disagreements became part of the film. But those disagreements didn’t even end after the shoot was wrapped and the film was edited. We continued to have those disagreements even during some interviews. But we leaned into that and made that a key feature of this project.
Again, because this subject matter is so loaded with complexity, we faced challenges at every turn. Originally we had cast an Israeli actress to play Yael the Director, but she dropped out two days before we started filming because she felt uneasy about the part and the potential professional and even personal consequences she’d face in Israel for participating. She asked for changes we were not willing to make and that we felt would undermine the complexity of the film. The brilliant Salome Azizi stepped into the role the night before our first shoot
When we scored the film one of the musicians we’d brought in refused to continue recording with our Sound Designer until the musician could speak with me on the phone to assess what “side” I was on. He wanted to make sure that this film would never appear at a “Free Palestine rally.” I told him I would show the film to any audience that was genuinely interested in seeing it without putting any caveats on where I might show the film. I’ve always been more interested in the types of conversations that a nuanced and difficult film like this might generate. I told him he was under no obligation to continue recording and that he could leave the studio if he was expecting me to answer with a “side”.
We applied to festivals prior to October 7th. I was actually enroute to one in Warsaw on October 7th. But even before then, we did not get into any Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, Palestinian or other Middle Eastern Film Festivals. It’s not because our film has a radical point of view–it’s because for the deeply conservative forces that run Palestine and Israel, simply making this film is a radical act. Juliano once said about his activist theatre in Jenin: “Children in the theater love us. The young people, they love us. Older people, thirty-five and up, they’re already established their ideology about Israel, about Palestine, about Islam, about Judaism, about everything. They hate us!” Extreme conservative thinking does not belong to Israel or Palestine; they both share that. Artists trying to interrogate these entrenched conservative power structures through their work– whether Yes Repeat No or Juliano and The Freedom Theatre– understand this. In the interim, this particular reality made the distribution of films that are focused on Palestine and Israel even more exceptional.
How do you balance your conceptual, academic approach to filmmaking with the emotional immediacy needed to engage audiences on a human level?
In making Yes Repeat No this was really what many of our conversations, negotiations, and sometimes arguments on set were about– how to not let the political context overwhelm the human core. I have a brilliant cast to thank for that. We had to create a space safe enough to trust each other to argue and contest matters we each individually believed in. So, to find balance, we had to be able to fight. But to fight, we needed a safe space in which we felt we could trust each other. The only thing I think we consistently agreed on was the maintenance of this safe space. Everything else was up for discussion, discourse, argumentation.
Generally speaking, I think the conceptual rigor is what generates the seeds of these projects– it’s what gives me something to chew on as a writer and as a director–that’s the side of me that’s the academic. But I’m supremely interested in making work that connects with people, and for me so much of that has to do with working the material in rehearsal. I look to directors like Mike Leigh in really developing my work in rehearsal with actors–that might be a relic from my start as a theatre director. When you put a script up on its feet and have people speak words, you have to contend with whether compelling conflict can construct a story. And when you spend time working a script with actors in rehearsal, surprising things happen that naturally have humanistic outcomes because it’s people that are doing that work. Oftentimes things get thrown out and rewritten. What I hope is that the conceptual origin of the work allows it to maintain a kind of poetry that prevents a collapse into the pedestrian or the melodramatic. That’s how I find that balance.
The film was completed before October 7th, yet its themes now feel urgently timely. How has the film’s context shifted for you and your audience in light of recent global events?
The film’s context has definitely changed. Before October 7th–and before the past two years–the general public did not know very much, if anything, about Palestine and Israel. In the aftermath of October 7th, this changed very quickly for certain demographics, particularly those born after the Oslo accords. It also changed–though more slowly– for older people whose view of Israel and Palestine was ossified by the Oslo Accords. As time passes, these perspectives– at least in the United States– become less polarized by the day, as illustrated by last week’s election.
After October 7th, the definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism became very blurry (especially for the media), very contentious (for students), and increasingly dangerous for artists, academics and journalists who address these subjects. And all the more so for those who support Palestinians. It seems to me straightforward that we are all people with the right to self-determination–and that we each deserve equal human rights that should not be dictated by where we are born and who our parents are. These days those who express this–especially about Palestine and Israel– are increasingly being censored. And sometimes, those who express what– at some point in the past– was not a controversial view are expressly targeted by the government and expelled by the dwindling and nearly universally conservatively-owned media conglomerates. It makes the distribution of this film that much more extraordinary. And given how much people have learned about Israel and Palestine over the past few years, this makes our film far more accessible to a wider audience than we’d ever considered when we were making the film. Especially since Yes Repeat No is a film that cultivates contradictions and avoids easy answers. The aftermath of 10/7 has been extraordinarily alienating and lonely for so many of us. Having created this piece to address our own experiences with this dissonance, we hope sharing our film will help others feel more understood and less alone in an increasingly ominous time.
You’ve described your work as interrogating both personal and political terrain. What questions about identity or belonging are you still wrestling with as an artist?
I firmly believe that Identity comes into existence through performance, it is inscribed at the moment of performance. At least that is the premise of this film. Identity is not a fixed, essential, unchanging constant, eternal and transcendental. Identity is lived and negotiated moment to moment, it is composed and hardened like sediment, and becomes naturalized as something monolithic and eternal, as Judith Butler has stated, but it is not. This, for me, is what it means to be an Israeli-American.
And I think part of understanding oneself is always about integrating context. This association to performance doesn’t make identity any less critical in how we live– but I think it’s a more dynamic and nuanced way of understanding identity. For Juliano, he ‘performed’ what it meant to be Israeli in the films of Amos Gitai, in a number of different roles, but he also performed that as an IDF soldier himself– and his performance as an IDF soldier is real life was unique to that context and different than each of his roles. But he also ‘performed’ a variety of different Arab characters in film, just as he also performed the role of an activist and a theatre practitioner. None of those was the Juliano, but all of them together was the constellation of identities we’ve come to understand as Juliano.
As YES REPEAT NO reaches new audiences through Freestyle Digital Media, what kind of dialogue do you hope this film sparks—both personally and globally?
More than anything it’s our hope that the deliberate confusion of seemingly distinct facets of Juliano’s identity encourages viewers to think beyond simple black and white binaries like us / them. We try hard to resist that kind of reduction and instead want to open up a space where the truly nuanced contradiction and complexity of this situation is cultivated as a way of acknowledging a very complicated shared history. We’re not trying to solve ‘peace in the middle east’, we just want to offer a deeply nuanced perspective of the fraught complexity of this historical moment.
I was born in Jerusalem; I have a place in my heart for Israel because it’s where I’m from. I find the events of October 7 irredeemably horrifying– no question. But I can simultaneously find the death of more than 69,000 Palestinians and the displacement of countless others absolutely terrible as well. Both of those things can be–and are–true at the same time. No one can convince me that holding both of these realities together is some kind of cop-out, you don’t get to tell me that. And I absolutely recognize that in declaring that I will be assigned to a ‘side.’ But I still retain the right to refuse that assignment, even if I recognize that the same rules and privileges don’t apply to all of us– as was grimly illustrated by what the No Other Land team has experienced since winning the Oscar last year. The choices and potential consequences I face (or Sarah, Braxton, and I) are very different from those faced by Palestinians.
Our film leans into contradiction and dissonance, not as a way of coming up with answers, but as a way of encouraging dialogue. Too often filmmakers (and distributors) avoid dissonance because they fear that it makes films more difficult for audiences to understand. We need to cultivate and support that kind of dissonance and difficulty in cinema. I was really blessed to work with a team of producers, crew and actors who were excited about that dissonance.
It has been beyond disappointing that other award-winning films on this topic (No Other Land, The Voice of Hind Rajab) have failed to find distribution. We’re beyond grateful for Freestyle’s stalwart support–and we hope other distributors will have the courage and wisdom to follow their lead to distribute films about Palestine and Israel. At this crucial moment in history when there’s suddenly– if also tragically– an audience for this film, we need more work that addresses this conflict. We need more cinema that helps audiences to understand both this conflict and each other even if– or especially because– there are no easy answers or solutions.
