Right before the opening title card of Noga hits the screen, you see Israeli rapper Noga Erez at her Tel Aviv home. It’s December 2023, two months after Oct. 7, when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took hostage some 251 others to neighboring Gaza. Erez has just come offstage from a performance in Jerusalem, where she gives everything she’s got rapping her 2021 hit “Fire Kites.” The song’s lyrics — “We don’t need bombs/We have fire kites” — take on an eerie resonance.
Later that pitch-black night, Erez steps to the edge of her terrace, looks down at the sleepy city below, and lets out a blood-curdling scream. Is it a cry for help? Rage at the war? Overwhelming grief? Artistic expression?
The documentary feature Noga, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival last month and is currently making the film-festival rounds, is as piercing as that shriek. It feels urgent. At a time of cultural boycotts, polarizing politics, and surging hate, artists — even those who protest the abuses of their government’s leaders — become targets.
That has been the daily reality for this act, which consists of rapper Erez and her partner in life and music, Ori Rousso. A look at Erez’s social media feed as the two pull up to a music festival reveals a barrage of messages. “Baby killer… war criminal… death to Zionists.” One reads: “Fucking Zionist piece of shit don’t come here or I’ll make you soap. Go back to Auschwitz.”
But Noga isn’t a political film, nor is it a pat music documentary, the type that claims to offer an unvarnished lens on the creative process but is essentially a marketing tool. The film is a tight, three-year snapshot of a couple on the crest of stardom, navigating war and white-knuckling the ups and downs of their own creative and romantic partnership.
Barely five minutes into Noga, you know you’re watching a tinderbox about to be ignited. For one, Erez lights up the screen like a flare, whether dropping quick-fire rhymes, jumping on a trampoline at home, or bouncing around the stage, dark bangs framing her big brown eyes, her hair pulled up in a bun showcasing her chiseled features, clad in high-tops, shorts, and her signature oversize men’s blazers.
“I discovered that I love men’s suits when I was five, wearing my dad’s suits,” she tells Rolling Stone from her home in Tel Aviv. “I feel myself in them.”
But Erez doesn’t need big, structured shoulders to lend her an air of authority. The way she commands the stage in the film’s opening scenes firmly positions her as a singular artist. “The next few years will determine the rest of my life,” she confides to the camera.
Oct. 7 and a resulting war in Gaza weren’t in the sights of Austrian directors Benji and Jono Bergmann when they began filming in 2021. Moreover, they knew little of Noga Erez, a unique talent who’s garnered comparisons to Björk and Doechii. Co-signed by the likes of Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, and Robbie Williams (the latter who appears in the film), the singer had been an opening act for Florence and the Machine and Pink, and seemed destined for the top of the bill.
From left, Benjamin Bergmann, Ori Rousso, Noga Erez, and Jono Bergmann at the Noga premiere in New York City on June 7.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
The Bergmanns were taken by the clash of elements present in the music. “You have big dance tracks haunted by death,” Jono says. “You have songs that are political and sexual at the same time, [that] talk about geopolitics, but some super specific personal emotions within that… the juxtapositions, I’d never heard music quite like that before.”
To Benji, the draw was simpler. “The creative process when you’re a couple,” he says — a topic he and Jono wrestle with as brothers and co-directors.
Adds Jono: “It was a mirror in some ways, and very different from us in others.”
Erez found the offer flattering and surprising. “We got into it not really knowing what it’s like to be documented in that way,” she says. “We regretted doing it a bunch of times in the process. We gave them full control and had no real say. We only had our gut feeling about them.”
The Bergmanns ventured outside their screen comfort zone for Noga. The brothers’ previous films included 2021’s Camp Confidential, about European Jews who found asylum in America after fleeing Nazi Europe, enlisted in the Army, and interrogated Nazi war criminals at a secret camp. They had never directed a film about musicians.
Complicating the storyboard, they had no idea that Erez and Rousso had temporarily split when shooting began. “We’re actually pretty private people,” Rousso says, noting that they kept their relationship status under wraps even to close friends.
“It’s a real mind-fuck for me,” says Erez, whose unfiltered manner of speaking contrasts Rousso’s more reserved demeanor. As he thoughtfully opines on needing more time to find his place in the relationship, she talks of deep longing for him, chiding Rousso for not missing her enough. They pour all those messy feelings into their music, and those intimate sessions are screen gold.
The lines blur even more as personal and professional pressures intensify. The two embark on a 2022 international tour. They play Madison Square Garden, drop the album KIDS, sign to Neon Gold and Atlantic, learn that Missy Elliot wants to remix “Nails” (another standout record for which Rousso used Erez’s fingers as percussion), appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and start recording in Los Angeles. They’re riding a career high, or so you think.
“Know that the only thing that doesn’t change is that it keeps on changing,” says Erez matter-of-factly.
Halfway through the film, the screen cuts to black. You hear sirens, the rapid fire of guns, and a voice crying, “There are terrorists here… they are shooting at us, help!” More captured audio of screams, desperation, and carnage from October 7 echo the primal release at the film’s start — a reminder that Noga is a story of artists under siege.
Courtesy of BABKA
You next see Erez and Rousso talking to family members, making emergency plans. The camera zooms in on a handgun resting on a surface, shiny and black like licorice. Erez picks it up, stares through the crosshairs, as a voice on the phone instructs them how to aim and shoot.
The film, the Bergmanns explain, is divided like an album with two sides. The A side starts with a gut punch. Flip it over, and the pair find a way back through their music.
But the world had other plans for the B side. As the film jogs back to the concert in Jerusalem, an Atlantic Records executive informs Erez and Rousso of a list circulating of Jews in Hollywood complicit in a “genocide” of Gazans.
“How are you doing?” the label man asks.
“I mean, it’s war,” Erez replies. “It’s not something the heart can grasp.”
Eventually she asks him: “Do you think it’ll get to a point where people won’t want to work with people from Israel or Jewish people?”
As Erez and Rousso grapple with the ensuing backlash of Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, she confides to Rousso: “This whole thing has made me question what this life is really all about, and if I’d actually rather cook and have kids.”
Unlike most sagas about band couples — Sonny & Cher, Fleetwood Mac — these guys don’t go down in flames musically or personally. We see them performing a new song for the hostages and their families and speaking out against the war. As the world implodes around them, they achieve new heights artistically. They release their album, Vandalist, shoot a video in Ukraine, and head out on tour in the summer 2024. The accolades and ballooning crowds beget a prime slot at Coachella.
But as they make their way to Indio, California, they face a new threat: Make a statement about “the occupation and genocide,” as conveyed by a festival organizer, or face cancellation.
“It’s not fair. It’s fucked up,” she says in the film. ”Most of us just want peace.”
The hope for Noga, adds Erez from Tel Aviv, “is that people will see us for the humans that we are.”
