Israeli drama series ‘Northern Storm’ erupts on screen

Northern Storm photos courtesy of Hot and NEXT TV.

Northern Storm, the long-anticipated Israeli drama series that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the elite 8200 IDF intelligence unit, was to premiere on Hot 3 on Thursday, April 18, at 10 p.m. It is also available on Hot VOD, and it’s a kind of cyber Fauda. It mostly lives up to the hype, and after viewing the first three episodes released to the press, I’m hooked.

The series, which opens with a disclaimer that it was conceived of and filmed before October 7, looks at how 8200 cracks a ring of Hezbollah operatives who infiltrate Israel and, like Fauda, each episode has at least one nail-biting, suspenseful sequence.

Given the secrecy surrounding the 8200 unit, there is no way to know how accurate any of this is, but the series portrays a state-of-the-art hi-tech headquarters in which AI is a central component and the computers display an avatar of each operative. Want to analyze the details of every ticket bought for a flight to Israel in the past year? The computer network can handle that in about 30 seconds, no problem.

At times, the series has to grapple with the central dramatic problem of the digital era, which emerged over 40 years ago with the movie WarGames and has been revisited in more recent films such as the Matrix franchise: how to make a person sitting in front of a computer and typing on a keyboard suspenseful.

Northern Storm photos courtesy of Hot and NEXT TV. (credit: OHAD ROMANO)

Northern Storm photos courtesy of Hot and NEXT TV. (credit: OHAD ROMANO)

In order to counter that, Northern Storm has its hero, Amir (Elisha Banai of Image of Victory) – a brilliant computer nerd who lacks the confidence of Dewey (Michael Aloni of Shtisel), his older brother who preceded him in 8200 and who is now a hi-tech success – go out into the field to capture bad guys. At key moments, he has the fighting-unit soldiers he accompanies hand him a tablet, and he types something that gives them crucial intel on how to proceed.

THE SERIES starts off with a bang (or two) and Amir blames himself for a friend’s death, which is the catalyst for the hero’s journey he embarks on to redeem himself. Adi (Lucy Ayoub, a star of Fauda’s recent season and frequent television presenter, who is from an unusual Jewish/Christian background), his colleague in the unit with whom he is having a secret romance, spends most of her time looking at screens and doing her best not to worry when he is risking his life. We learn early on that she was once involved with his brother, in the series’ most clichéd storyline.

But that isn’t the only secret Dewey is hiding. The entrepreneur is in hot water with his billionaire tech boss and has suddenly returned to Israel to make things right, which has something to do with him re-joining 8200. As he plots his next move, he lounges around in a Tel Aviv pad the size of a stadium with an outdoor pool, which may be the most expensive apartment in the world.

Other characters include an ultra-Orthodox computer geek who hides from his community the fact that he is a soldier (only his parents know) and Helen (Ingrid García Jonsson), an icy blonde who says she is from Sweden and pretends to be a vulnerable convert and is also the girlfriend of an academic who handles IDF technology. Yadin Gellman, the actor and Special Forces soldier who was injured defending Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, also has a small role.

To discuss the plot in any further detail would risk revealing spoilers, but each episode is even faster paced than the one before, and most end in cliff-hangers. That’s not surprising, given that the series was created by Amit Cohen (a writer on such series as Valley of Tears and False Flag), Assaf Bernstein (a director on Fauda), and Daniel Shinar (who wrote the novel Red Skies and the TV series based on it). Once this war ends, you can expect to see this series travel the globe.

‘Harvey Keitel: Unafraid of the Dark’

“I think of myself as a former Marine who got lucky, really lucky,” says Harvey Keitel in the new documentary about his life and career, Harvey Keitel: Unafraid of the Dark by Stephane Benhamou and Erwan Le Gac, which will be available on Hot VOD and will be shown on Hot 8 on Sunday, April 21 at 9:15 p.m.

The actor has had an amazing career playing mostly tough guys for directors such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, in such films as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction. Even in great casts featuring actors such as Robert De Niro and Bruce Willis, it’s often Keitel who makes the strongest impression.

Keitel recently starred in the title role in Lansky, about the infamous Jewish gangster. And next month, he will be seen in the lead role in The Tattooist of Auschwitz, an upcoming Peacock Original series that will be shown in Israel and which is based on the bestselling novel of the same name.

Not everyone knows, though, that Keitel is Jewish, born to Romanian and Ukrainian immigrants in 1939 and raised in the “Little Odessa” Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, a vibrant place that helped shape him. His father made and sold hats at the entrance to the subway, while his observant grandfather took the boy to synagogue every day.

But he was rebellious and more interested in the freak show at the amusement park and the great movies starring Marlon Brando and James Dean he saw. Soon Keitel dropped out of school and joined a street gang of Jewish kids who called themselves “The Brighton Beach Sinners.” The Marines offered him a way out of his neighborhood. After three years of service, he returned to New York in 1960 and got a job as a court stenographer, studying acting at night with legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Fortuitously, he met Scorsese and was cast in his 1967 film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door.

The biographical documentary goes into the story of how Keitel was cast in the leading role of Colonel Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, only to be fired after three weeks of shooting, which he says derailed his career for many years. According to this film, which shows rare photos of Keitel on the Apocalypse set and in scenes with Robert Duvall, he was replaced by Martin Sheen because he had his own ideas about how to play the role, based on his Marine training. The production blamed all the early delays in filming on how difficult Keitel was, which the actor denies. But eventually, Tarantino cast Keitel in iconic, street-smart roles in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, which revitalized his career.

‘Franklin’

Michael Douglas is another Jewish actor who, like Keitel, is not afraid to play characters who are not conventionally likable such as Gordon “Greed is good” Gekko in Wall Street. His talent for being opinionated and ornery is on display in the new Apple TV+ series, Franklin, in which he plays American founding father Benjamin Franklin. While some have found this casting odd, Douglas is able to capture the playfulness and contrarian spirit that shines through Franklin’s writing. In spite of an attempt by the series’ creators to lure in young viewers with plot lines about Franklin’s grandson, it’s Douglas who gets all the best lines and has the most interesting scenes.