For the new season of Netflix‘s Fauda, the creators are set to confront the Oct. 7 attacks and aftermath.
In an interview with the New York Times ahead of the show‘s fifth season premiering on the streamer Tuesday, Lior Raz describes taking on that day and aftermath in the show is “maybe the most important thing that we ever wrote.” Raz also stars in the series as Doron.
His writing partner, Avi Issacharoff added, “This was something that burned inside us, that we felt we had to spill it out. The pain, the sadness, the catastrophe, the loss of people, the loss of close people. The confusion during that day, the impotence of the Israeli public, but also especially the people that were living there in Gaza’s periphery.”
According to Netflix, the 11-episode season will feature two episodes that take place on Oct. 7, 2023 and follow the characters through their experiences of that day. The rest of the reason will take place two years later. “Two years after October 7th, and haunted by their trauma, Fauda’s fighters embark on a deadly race to stop a catastrophic attack on Israel, forcing them to confront the true cost of fighting the war after the war,“ a synopsis for season five reads.
Given the Gaza war was underway while they planned the season, the NYT reports that “they plotted a story that steered clear of Gaza almost entirely, ranging instead from Europe to Israel with stops elsewhere in the Middle East.“
“You try to be as close to reality as possible. On the other hand, you cannot show everything, because it’s too terrible,“ Issacharoff said.
Despite the season premiering amid ongoing boycotts and backlash with many speaking out on the Israel-Gaza conflict, Raz told the NYT he wants viewers to “love the show“ but also, “I want them to look in my character’s eyes, and to see what we felt on those days. If it would happen in their countries, they would feel exactly like we felt and how we feel about the world. So I hope it would open people’s eyes to see what happened on Oct. 7.”
In a separate interview with Netfix‘s Tudum, Issacharoff said of writing the two episodes centered on Oct. 7, “We were shaking.“
“Here in Israel, it’s something that no one can forget,” Issacharoff said, adding that the writers asked themselves while crafting the season, “‘Am I going to do something that will make people suffer more? [Make people] more sad? Hurt people that lost their closest [loved ones]? Hurt people on the other side?’”
“But,” he added, “I think that we went with our truth — with our belief — that this is the right story to tell, and this is the right way to tell the story.”
“This is a TV show,” Issacharoff reiterated. “It’s not reality. But still, we thought that there was a story here to be told. We wanted to ask very tough questions to people all over the world, not only in Israel.“
Writing the new season, Issacharoff said, allowed him to “breathe again.“
He explained, “It allowed me to take all the pain, and even anger, and put it in a document, to put it in a script, and to send it all over the world to people in America, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Israel, of course. At the end, I felt that this was the most important thing that I’ve done in my career, ever. In the last 26 years that I’ve been a journalist and an analyst, this is the most sacred mission that I’ve had, the most important thing.”
Alongside Raz, Mélanie Laurent , Hakim Djaziri, Yaakov Zada Daniel and Doron Ben-David also star in the series.
Omri Givon directed the season with Omri Shenhar, Issacharoff, Raz, Sari Azoulay Turgeman, Givon, Yona Rozenkier, and Nir Berger writing. It was created and executive produced by Issacharoff and Raz, and produced by Liat Benasuly.
Fauda streams globally on Netflix on Sept. 8.
