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The timing of the release ofOur Boyscouldnt be more tragically relevant.
There are so many layers underneath what you call a hate crime, Levi continues.
And what happens when those layers meet incitement and create a perfect storm to create murder?
By summers end, more than2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis were dead.
Our Boysfocuses on the middle part of that ordeal, and does so with a documentarians eye for detail.
The former of those two goals was the paramount.
They were shocked by how successful they were.
Theyd solved it quite fast and quick.
So we were inside the Shabak, very, very deep inside.
As much as it gets.
We got from the lawyers all the materials they got including Shabak-made video reenactments starring the perpetrators.
That wasnt the end of their research, says Levi: What else did we get?
A lot of background research about the situation in Jerusalem at that time.
In the show, hes a man named Simon.
In reality, the character is an amalgamation of various Shabak operatives that the creators encountered in their research.
He cant just excuse this event by saying, I dont know where these people came from.
We were looking for a main character who cant run away from his closeness to this horrible act.
Still, Levi admits this attempt was something of a failure, albeit a perhaps-inevitable one.
I dont think well ever fully understand what happened, he says.
There are many, many layers.
Theres the religious layer.
The fact that they areMizrahim that is, Jews whose backgrounds lie in Arab-dominated regions of the world.
The fact that they had mental problems.
The fact that they took from Judaism, from the wrong side of Judaism, very basic racist ideas.
All these many layers met incitement in the wrong moment.
To say that we can fully comprehend what happened is pretentious.
But I think we understood that some kind of zeitgeist creates tension.
The bereaved family, its almost a status in Israel, says Levi.
Its something so deep in the culture.
So many people lost their sons in wars and terror attacks.
Levi has confidence thatOur Boyscan pull this off because hes already seen it happen.
My brother died in the Lebanon War years ago, he says.
They are a bereaved family.
So, in a way, I am quite sure this is going to happen with Jewish people.
Personally, everything I do is local, but the meanings are universal, says Levi.
For me, its not about what Americans will think of the conflict here.
Its about how this is totally connected to their reality.
