Whenever I look at pictures of horrific things that soldiers do or that have been done to soldiers I always feel sorry for everybody involved because politics throws them into these horrific situations where really it's just 18-year-old kids.
— Gideon Raff
I'm Israeli and gay.
The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.
In America, after 9/11, and after the death of bin Laden, and after two wars, one of them fought, a lot of people think, on false pretenses, and definitely post the Patriot Act, there are a lot of these questions about what can we do to our citizens in order to prevent the next attack.
When you live far away, home looks a little different every time.
Here in Israel, we want the boys back home, we demand it from our government, who often pay a steep price to get hostages back. But we need a happy ending. We don't want to deal with those days after release, their post-trauma or reintroduction to society. Yet coming home is only the start of their journey.
The lives of prisoners of war after they are returned is almost never discussed, never explored.
Israel's a small country but both the audience and programme-makers are very sophisticated.
When I tell my American counterparts that my budget was $200,000 per episode, they burst out laughing. To us that's a big production, to them it's a guerrilla shoot.
