Israelis go to Sri Lanka to process trauma in ‘Arugam Bay’

Arugam Bay, the new movie by Marco Carmel about young Israelis coping with wartime trauma by going surfing in Sri Lanka, starts with a haunting opening quote that is repeated during the movie: “In Arugam Bay, there is a saying about Israelis that they think that they deserve every wave. Either they’re 18 and are sure they are going to die in the army, or they’re 22, and they stayed alive.”

The movie, which opened in theaters around Israel on Thursday, couldn’t be more relevant to the trauma so many young Israelis are trying to process right now.

But it is about the aftermath of a different, smaller-scale conflict between Israel and Lebanon and is set in 2015. It features some of Israel’s biggest stars.

Joy Rieger, who was in Image of Victory, The Other Story, and many other films, plays Kim, who has fled a religious upbringing and lives happily in the moment in the surfing scene in Israel, very much in love with her boyfriend, Yuval (Yaniv Harlap). He likes to hang out with his army buddies, Gal (Yadin Gellman, who co-starred with Rieger in Image of Victory) and Michael (Maor Schwietzer, who was in the Matchmaking movies, Line in the Sand, and Valley of Tears). 

But when Yuval is killed fighting in Lebanon, all three are devastated and, in a plot turn that echoes something we’ve seen so much in the year following the October 7 massacre, they decide to go on the surfing vacation that they had hoped to take with Yuval. Kim brings along Yuval’s hat and sunglasses to Sri Lanka, and eventually affixes them to a wooden pillar – as if he is looking out at the beach.

Struggle of grief and guilt

But although they have gotten far away from Israel, the demons that plague each of them have been exacerbated by Yuval’s death, and conflicts emerge among the three friends as they try to chill out but find they can’t. They struggle with feelings of grief and guilt, and aren’t sure how to move on. The attraction the characters feel toward each other makes everything more complicated because they feel that to act on their attraction would be to betray Yuval’s memory. 

Carmel, a director born in Israel, who spent part of his childhood in France and has had a career in both countries, said of the film’s timing, “It’s ironic because in a way the film is in a dialogue with this period right now. People asked me at the premiere when I made this film and when I told them it was finished shooting in May 2022, they couldn’t believe it...  What happened on October 7, of course, was an extreme, awful event, but the cycle of war in Israel, from 1982, when I was drafted, in the first Lebanon War, this cycle has continued in wars with Lebanon and Gaza. The movie isn’t about this war now, it’s about the cycles of war here that don’t stop.”

THE MOVIE was inspired by several ideas, said Carmel, who has directed acclaimed films here and in France, including My Lovely Sister, Father’s Footsteps, and Noble Savage, and has directed several television series, among them Harem. 

One inspiration came from the fact that he is an avid surfer. He knew of a young surfer who was traumatized during his army service and disappeared for over a year, during which he took his surfboard and went surfing all over the world. “He understood what he needed to understand and came back. When he got back, he said that finally, a year and a half after he finished his service, he had really left the army. His story really grabbed me.”

On a surfing website, Carmel came across the quote he used at the opening of the film, which got him thinking. “We live in existential danger here, and when we go on vacation, some of the tension bursts out of us in all kinds of ways,” he said. 

In all his previous films, he had dealt with people on society’s margins, like the family in Noble Savage, where a teen boy has to cope with a drug-addicted mother. He decided he wanted to make a film about “what it means to be Israeli, without any socioeconomic or political definitions. Just about being Israeli, and to show it through surfing.”

The movie also demonstrates how all the national identities can fall to the wayside in the surfing community, as Gal befriends an Iranian surfer he meets in the water. “When you’re in the water on your board, wearing a bathing suit, you lose some of your identity,” he said, noting that he had befriended Iranian and Lebanese surfers around the world. “When we had had too much to drink, we would start cursing our politicians together.”

The fates of each character represent different paths that Israeli youth take: One stays in Sri Lanka, to grieve for their lost friend, far from the weight of Israeli society’s expectations, one re-enlists in the army, and one returns but has no clear path. 

“A lot of Israelis go abroad and stay abroad for years, some go back to the army, or [to] university, or hi-tech, and lock away their trauma, until it bursts out somehow, or doesn’t, and some have trouble coping the rest of their lives.” 

The third character is the one with whom Carmel most identifies, and he joked, “Maybe he’ll go to film school.”Carmel didn’t anticipate that the film would open in the middle of a multi-front war, and he said that the war had touched the lives of cast and crew as it has affected people all over Israel. 

Yadin Gellman, who is in Sayeret Matkal, an elite fighting unit, was sent to Be’eri on October 7, where he was injured, and Yaniv Harlap, who portrayed Yuval, went to fight in Lebanon. The movie’s sound technician, Lior Waitzman, was killed in Sderot. 

“On Wednesday, our movie screened in Haifa, and on Saturday, Yadin was already injured. And five days later, Harlap was in Lebanon, he is in the [naval commando unit] Shayetet.”

Carmel said he felt moviegoers would relate to the film because, in Israel, “We’re all suffering from post-trauma. If you take our army service, plus our family backgrounds, you can’t really be a normal human. If you come from a North African background, or a military family, or the second or third generation after the Holocaust, we all carry heavy burdens on our backs. That’s what we live with here.”

The director, who recently finished shooting a movie and television series about the Black Panther Mizrahi activist group in Jerusalem in the early 70s, just got back from a trip to Sri Lanka to celebrate, and he said he hadn’t encountered any antisemitic or anti-Israeli feeling or threats at all. 

“It’s a wonderful place,” he said. “Israelis just need to learn how to relax to appreciate” the slow pace of Sri Lankan life.