If the name Yadin Gellman sounds familiar, it’s because he was the first Israeli celebrity casualty of the war that began on October 7.
As an officer in Israel’s Special Forces, Yadin – who stars in the new movie, Victory, which opened in Israel on February 8 – was one of the first soldiers to enter the kibbutzim in the South on the day of the massacre and to stop the slaughter of civilians there, and he saw firsthand some of the worst atrocities. The Special Forces soldiers sent in were outnumbered by the hundreds of Hamas terrorists, and at Kibbutz Be’eri, he sustained serious injuries to his lung, shoulder, and hand.
On the morning the war broke out, he was on a camping trip with friends, including his girlfriend, Keshet 12’s star reporter, Adva Dadon, to celebrate his 30th birthday. But today he doesn’t really want to talk about Dadon, or his injuries. Nor does he want to focus on his modeling career – he just starred in a new campaign for the clothing retailer, Renuar and soon you will be seeing his face on posters all over the country.
What he really wants to speak about today is his acting, a career he realized he wanted to try while he was in the army. He has appeared in theater and on television, but right now he is best known for his movie debut in Avi Nesher’s 2021 film, Image of Victory (available worldwide on Netflix), where he played an army officer in charge of the defense of Kibbutz Nitzanim, near the Egyptian border, during the War of Independence.
This performance drew rave reviews and gave him the opportunity to work with one of Israel’s greatest directors in his very first role. Nesher, who is a stickler for authenticity in his films, had Gellman teach the rest of the cast how to handle firearms in a realistic-looking way.
He was then cast in Eliran Peled’s Victory, an innovative musical that plays almost like an Israeli version of La La Land and focuses on two couples before and in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Both Victory and his next film, Marco Carmel’s Arugam Bay – a look at three friends coping with the fallout from the Second Lebanon War while on a trip to Sri Lanka – premiered at the Haifa International Film Festival, just days before the outbreak of the current war.
The irony of his shifts between being a soldier and playing one isn’t lost on him, and he feels that his understanding of the reality of war has only enhanced his performances. Gellman said that preparing for the musical Victory was not really so different from doing a straightforward drama and that the music was an interesting way to look at the characters’ trauma.
“It’s still about bringing the character to life,” he said. In one scene in Victory, the heroine, played by Amit Farkash, sings lead in a musical number, while Gellman sang harmony but had no lines of his own. “I had to dig deep and realize all that my character is feeling... just like in a dramatic feature. I had to go under the text and show what was going on with my character in that very complex moment. I was singing the words, not speaking them, but it’s the same challenge to express the emotions.”
He recently saw Victory again – parts of it were re-edited following the outbreak of the war – and said, “This movie is amazing without the 7th of October, and with everything that’s happening, and with everything that happened to me... this movie is just out of this world.” It shows in detail how the characters cope with PTSD and alienation from their families when they return from war.
It’s also the story of an aspiring actress and how she balances getting her career on track with her relationship with her traumatized lover. “I think this movie is an opportunity for us... it’s like a door that opens a way for us to deal with what we’re going through in a way that feels a little distant, we’re not talking about this war, we’re talking about the Six Day War.”
He is happy to depict what soldiers endure
He said he was happy that he has had the chance to play complex representations of what soldiers go through on the battlefield and at home, and to work with such gifted directors. “I haven’t been stuck just playing an action figure,” he said, although he admitted he wouldn’t mind playing different kinds of parts. “I’d love to play a haredi sometime, I’d love to play anything that’s interesting.”
Since recovering from his injuries, he has become active in presenting Israel’s case to the world, taking speaking engagements in the US. He was a natural for this assignment due to the fact that he grew up as an English speaker born to American and Canadian parents in a religious family in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood.
After about two months in the hospital, he said, “I decided, basically, on my own, to leave the hospital to join the hasbara forces [Israel’s public diplomacy efforts], because I thought if I’m not fighting the battle on the ground, I have to help win this war in whatever way I could and the only way I could do that was by speaking, through hasbara, and to use my power on social media.”
Just as he pushed himself when he was in the army and training to be an actor, he has kept up a schedule that would be punishing for anyone, and much more so for someone recovering from multiple gunshot wounds. Each trip has involved a number of speaking engagements and he has moved on to new cities almost every day.
“I’m sleep-deprived all the time, and always on the move. But I do feel that it has been rewarding because I do feel I am part of the war and winning this thing. And it’s been interesting, meeting Jews and non-Jews, Jews who agree with you and need your support, and also people who don’t understand the war and the conflict, how deep it is and how complicated it is,” he said.
While his parents aren’t in the film industry, his mother runs a well-known art gallery in Jerusalem, State of the Arts, and he learned to love the arts growing up. Since he began acting, he said, he has learned a great deal on the movie sets he has worked on and he is interested in directing. Currently, he is working on a short film, which will loosely be based on his experience of deciding to stop being traditionally observant. But he is quick to note that his parents have been “extremely supportive” of his career choice.
Gellman feels the story told in Victory mirrors the conflict many Israelis are experiencing right now. “We can’t let the war shut us down. We have to have a life,” he said, and as the title suggests, Victory deals with the very concept of what winning means. The loss of life on both sides in this war doesn’t feel like a victory he said, nor does the fact that more than 100 people are still held hostage in Gaza. He believes that a movie like Victory is important for people to see today: “This movie holds a mirror to our reality.”