Gal El-Ad | גל אל-עד‎ (Guilty) / 2015

terrorist for sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gal El-Ad (screenwriter and director) גל אל-עד‎ (Guilty) / 2015 [17 minutes]

 

Eitan (Omri Fūhrer) is a security guard in a factory at the Dead Sea Works. He and his fellow guards have just been told that they will not face 12-hour shifts, boring night watches when hardly anything happens, but that still necessitates their vigilance.

     Early in the morning he enters the bus where the driver (Itzik Golan) is waiting, the others not yet having arrived. The driver, a slightly older man, begins to make chit-chat, asking him if the area in which he lives consists mostly of younger people.

     “Do you live alone?”

     “No,” Eitan answers.

      With whom, the driver wants to know.

      Eitan responds, “a roommate.”

      “You guys sit around, drink, bring girls over?”

      And when Eitan makes no answer, he still probes further: “Did you party last night?”

      “A bit?”

      The driver doesn’t let up. “Girls?”

     When again he receives no answer, he stands up and goes back to join his younger rider. By this time he has clearly figured out the situation and is ready to take advantage of it.

       “We’re just talking you know, kill some time.”

       Again, he brings up girls and how he’s just horny thinking about them. When he still receives no response, he immediately focuses in: “You aren’t hot for the girls there? [South America]” In the very next moment, the driver calls him “Cutie,” and asks if he can get closer, beginning the fondle the younger man.

       It appears that Eitan doesn’t at all mind and is most willing to engage in sex. The driver pulls off Eitan’s clothes, pulling down his own pants and shorts. But what quickly occurs is rather brutal anal sex, closer to a rape.

       The others soon after appear, and are driven to their various destinations. Eitan is assigned to the parking lot, where he crawls us into a small watchtower, in which, he has been told by the exciting guard, the air conditioning is not working, making it surely more like a hot box.

      Later that evening, we watch Eitan watching porn on his cellphone while jacking off, an act that infuriates him. Later, while making his checks, he observes, in the near distance, the driver showering off with what appears to be another man, the driver strutting back and forth in the raw.

      There is clearly lust in Eitan’s eyes as he eagerly watches the two. And soon after, he picks up the cellphone, calling the driver, identifying as the one who he drove “here” this morning, asking for him to come and pick him up?

      The driver tells him it will take a while, but as Eitan waits alongside the highway, he is soon after picked up. Another rider, a boy, lies in a seat, asleep, as the driver begins to tell a story that is hard to determine whose it is, his own or the sleeping boy’s.

     “He wanted to come see the Dead Sea. He waited a long time for this. I said we’d go camping while I was working. That’s the best I could do.” We finally recognize the boy must be his son.

     Soon after, the driver stops his bus, saying he has to take a leak, but really an occasion for Eitan to join him so they might again have sex. When Eitan does not respond, he knocks on the window, signaling for the worker to come out. Finally, Eitan stands, appearing that he is coming out.

     But in the next few minutes we watch the bus speeding on, evidently Eitan now at the wheel, having escaped another brutal sexual encounter, now filled with guilt as well, as he as basically hijacked the son in his flight. Eventually, he pulls into a brightly-lit gas station, and bolts on foot, running off into the desert. The boy awakens and leaving the bus wonders where he is.

      Out of breath, Eitan momentarily stops and shoots off a flare, presumably signifying where the bus now is. The boy looks up to see the red flare in the sky.

       We now realize, of course, that the “other man” Eitan has seen the driver with was, in fact, his son, not at all the sexual situation he and even we might have imagined.

       The film seems to end with Eitan sitting in the back seat of a police car.

       It is now early morning at the plant works, as if it might have all been a strange dream.

     This film is so psychologically complex in its entanglement of desire and guilt and in its visual accomplishments that it is hard to imagine it is a student effort, yet it is.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).