Raz Bar David Varon | לילא אחת ביאפא (Layla Achat BeYafa) (One Night in Jaffa) / 2014

a night on the town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raz Bar David Varon (screenwriter and director) לילא אחת ביאפא (Layla Achat BeYafa) (One Night in Jaffa) / 2014 [24 minutes]

This is a sad film, where Layla (Tzachi Zeev Look), a transexual woman, just offered hormone therapy by her doctors, decides to celebrate a night on the town. Her constantly snacking mother, sitting on the living room couch (Miriam Cohen) vaguely attempts to dissuade her, but Layla, putting on her best shimmering dress, desperate to get out and find whether her new identity will lead to any success in a Jaffa gay bar.

     It does not. The bar is filled with ruffians, gay men, and people totally disinterested in such a beauty. She pushes her way in through the door keep, but almost as quickly leaves the establishment for a much needed cigarette break.

    In this neighborhood, young rough men sit smoking and drinking, one of whom Layla, a bit in desperation by this time, approaches. He is Or (Ori Levanon), who seems harmless enough and is rather attractive, and before long he shows a willingness to return back home with her.

     By this time, Layla’s mother is already sleeping, as they walk by her sleeping body to the transgender’s woman’s room, she explaining that her mother does not permit her to bring back the men she meets.

      Or, perhaps a bit rambunctious, willing joins her, but soon after begins to describe her as a male, and appears more interested in her penis than acknowledging her own identity. It becomes quickly apparently that he likes transgender women more for what might be described as “role playing” that observing their new identities. She protests, but he threatens her, and before she can even begin to complain, he turns her over and basically rapes her, fucking her in the butt. He quickly dresses and leaves.

     Layla, shaken and frightened, not only by the evening’s event, but for what might be her future, sits down before her still sleeping mother and attempts to cuddle up to her, desperate for love that she now knows won’t be at all easy to find in her new world.

   It is a shattering preview of the difficulties transgender women find throughout the world, but particularly in such patriarchal and religiously closed-off worlds as Jaffa is, or that matter, how life is still for many transgender individuals throughout the USA.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).