Long ago, in the mid-1990s, at a Monica Sex concert in the town of Aseret, a 14-year-old girl stood by the stage watching the handsome guitarist Peter Roth. Suddenly, in line with the rural setting’s reputation, a huge green praying mantis landed on Roth’s microphone. The stunned guitarist burst out laughing, and so did the 14-year-old girl (“I looked like I was six”), and their eyes met.
Years passed before Netta Garti and Peter Roth met again — a meeting that would turn into a relationship and later parents to two children, Leny, 18, and Arik, 13. Even today, every few weeks Garti likes to go to Monica Sex concerts, stand in the crowd on the guitarist’s side of the stage, and look at him through the eyes of a fan.
“It's an incredible gift,” she says. “It resets something, brings you back to a very primal place of appreciation. It’s like going back in time — you’re not thinking about anything at home or what needs to be done, you press a button and I go back to being a 15-year-old girl listening to Monica Sex. He feels something similar when he comes to see me in the theatre. Seeing your partner at their peak is very good for a relationship — I recommend it.”
But while at concerts Garti easily slips into the perspective of an excited fan, in her professional life as an actress reality can sometimes feel too intense. During filming of the new season of Fauda (currently airing on yes and coming to Netflix in August), parts of which were shot near Beit Kama in the Gaza border region, the production asked cast and crew to sleep in a nearby kibbutz to save travel time.
“The kibbutzim were still not populated, and I asked the crew if they were managing to sleep at night,” she recalls. “They said there were such strong booms that they didn’t sleep at all. I told the producer I would just drive back and forth — if I want to film 12 hours awake, I need to sleep at home and not inside a trigger.”
“Everyone was inside a trigger and we still are. Something in me wasn’t ready yet to process the trauma — it was too early to contain it. In order to process trauma you need to understand it deeply, and personally I feel that the lack of clear explanations, the lack of a commission of inquiry, not knowing exactly what happened to us — that healing hasn’t happened. There’s a kind of demon there that feels like there is no logical order in the mind, and when you don’t know what really happened, it traps the trauma. You can’t process it or break it down. That is part of why we are still stuck there. I haven’t managed to get out of it.”
Will Fauda help with processing it or reinforce it?
“In my view, Fauda being on Netflix is one of the most effective ways to bring understanding and bridge gaps — to explain what we are going through through the heart and the soul, not through logic or rational analysis.”
But this season is also dominated, at least so far, by a theme of revenge.
“True, but there is also trauma there, and for foreign audiences who are not necessarily sympathetic to us, it can create a deeper understanding. Because it’s the personal story of characters the audience has known for four seasons, and suddenly they experience their break. When you watch television you open emotionally and connect — it doesn’t pass you by like news or current affairs.”
The relationship between Gali and Doron, played by Garti and Lior Raz, has gone through ups and downs over the previous seasons. It is not easy being the wife of Doron Kavillio, a covert operative who sometimes lives more in his work than in his life. Their story is one of ongoing erosion, as Gali tries to maintain a stable home and push Doron to retire, while he remains trapped in the world of operations. In season two their relationship collapses, in season four there is some reconnection, and in the current season — set two years after October 7 — they are reunited again, but Doron is quickly pulled back into action, leaving Gali behind once more.
As Garti sees it, the role of the woman who stays at home has taken on a broader collective meaning.
“I’m more on the other side — Peter wasn’t in reserve duty — but Leny enlisted and I experience it through friends as well. The feeling is that you stay at home holding the anxiety and the normality. This is no longer just a story about that one woman — it is a story about women in Israel, about the weight that remains at home. Those who did not go to fight are left carrying unbearable anxiety about the fate of loved ones, and also trying to maintain sanity and the life we used to know. At the premiere, I felt we are carrying so much baggage that it is impossible to separate what happens on screen from what you are living.”
“So this is part of the processing?”
“More than anything, I think examining what we went through is critical for everyone. It’s not about right, left, center, religious or secular — it crosses all categories of society. I can only speak from what I feel and understand, and for me personally I need to understand. Families of the fallen especially need to understand how it happened in order to begin rebuilding this trauma. You cannot repair fractures without understanding where they came from. I struggle to see how a society can rise from something without shape or order.”
And Leny is now in the army. Where is she stationed?
“She’s close to home, she comes back every day, everything is fine, I can breathe. But it’s always a milestone at this age. And it’s amazing — her entire environment, people her age, are very patriotic. I didn’t feel that at their age, we were in completely different times. But COVID, the ongoing war, the trauma — it probably creates that sense of commitment. They understand on their own skin what it means to live here.”
When Garti regained some of her free time, she knew exactly how she wanted to fill it. At 46, she now walks daily to Tel Aviv University, where she has been studying film for two years. You might think that 25 years on film, television and theatre sets would teach you everything you need to know about the profession, but Garti wanted to expand.
She first entered Israeli culture with a charming role in Turn Left at the End of the World, continued with an extensive theatre career at Beit Lessin and the Cameri Theatre, is still identified in public as “Cookie” from The Arbitrator, and recently also starred in Tom Nesher’s Ophir-winning film Come Closer, based on her brother Ari Nesher.
Now she studies video editing, cinematography, film history, and tries to communicate with students in their twenties who dream of cinema.
“It’s very funny,” she admits. “Studying with such young people is like learning a new language — especially things connected to technology.”
TikTok?
“No, no, it’s cinema — we watch Godard,” she laughs. “But yes, things my acting experience doesn’t necessarily prepare you for. I’ve never opened editing software, never held a camera. They mostly see me sitting at the computer almost breaking the screen from frustration because I don’t know how to do the simplest thing. Then they come over and in a second say, ‘you move this like this and cut it like that.’ And at the same time I read their scripts and give them feedback.”
You’re an outsider.
“I will always be an outsider because I’m the age of their parents, but I’ve always felt a bit like that in different places in life. On the outside I cover it in different ways, but inside I know how to feel like an outsider and live with it. I’ve reached an age where I accept it. I don’t fight that part of me anymore.”
Do they like having a celebrity in class?
“They are very kind and accepting, but it takes time to build trust — especially from their side, for them to believe I’m serious and not losing it. It took a while, but once they saw I show up every day and do the work, they understood I wasn’t losing it — this is really what I want to do. I’m still an actress, and that is something I still dream about, it still beats strongly in me. But my creative side also wants to grow. I want to write, I have aspirations to direct. A director needs to know how to shoot, lenses, editing, lighting. I’m from the old school that believes that.”
But you come from the field, you know how it really works, and they are still in the innocent fantasy.
“But it’s nice to be in the fantasy. Sometimes I also catch that hope that everything is still open. As an artist you need that space of innocence and dreaming. And you never really know — a short film you make in school can suddenly go out into the world. For me it comes from a need for knowledge. Many of my friends my age are going through a kind of awakening, a need to grow, curiosity that suddenly takes over. It’s not as unusual as it sounds.”