“Yes Repeat No”, a searing portrait of identity now streaming across North America
Freestyle Digital Media has officially rolled out Yes Repeat No on North American VOD and DVD, with the drama now available to rent and own across all major digital, cable, and satellite platforms as of November 11, 2025.
The release brings wider visibility to a film whose relevance has only sharpened. Yes Repeat No dissects the layered, often conflicting identities of Juliano Mer-Khamis — a Palestinian Jew, former IDF paratrooper, actor, director, and activist who famously declared himself “100% Palestinian and 100% Jewish.” His assassination on the steps of the Jenin Freedom Theatre cemented his status as a cultural flashpoint, but the film goes further, interrogating the internal fractures he carried long before the world imposed its labels.
The narrative device is simple and ruthless: three actors audition to play Juliano. The rehearsal room becomes a crucible. Each performer attempts to embody a man who was seen as Arab in Israel, Jewish in Jenin, and typecast as a terrorist in Hollywood. As they switch between versions of Juliano, their own identities begin to blur, crack, and destabilize.
Beyond the narrative whispers
Completed before October 7, 2023, the film arrived at the Warsaw Film Festival just as global discourse around Palestine and Israel intensified. Its pre-2023 vantage point has become part of its force: a rare space where Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans collaborated during the pandemic to make a work not defined by reaction, but by inquiry.
Writer-director Michael Moshe Dahan describes the film’s intention as bridge-building rather than rhetoric: “We could examine our collective, fraught history with nuance and compassion, without clinging to ‘sides’.” The screenplay incorporates direct quotes from historical leaders — Arafat, Netanyahu, and others — to reveal how political language mutates over time and how meaning shifts depending on who is speaking, and when.
The film asks whether a single person’s hybrid identity can illuminate centuries of conflict — and whether healing comes from remembering history, or from letting parts of it go.
Secrets waiting unveiled
Produced by Dahan, N. Braxton Pope, and Sarah Szalavitz, the film features Salome Azizi (‘The Director’), Mousa Kraish (‘Arab Juliano’), Adam Meir (‘Public Juliano’), and Karim Saleh (‘Israeli Juliano’). Freestyle acquired the film directly from the filmmakers and Glen Reynolds of Circus Road Films.
