Film Review: “Know Hope,” Directed by Omer Shamir

Know Hope. Directed by Omer Shamir, Deux Beaux Garcons Films, 2025.

By Ben Sharif

“WE OWN NOTHING.” A philosophical notion, a personal self-reckoning, a radically political stance, these thought-provoking words are handwritten before our eyes in black expo marker by a figure in a black cap onto a wide view of barren hillside – Masafer Yatta, Occupied Palestine, 2024. This intervention is one of many by the street artist known as “Know Hope” –  a collector of fragments of countless stories who transposes them into exquisite, evocative invocations on rural, urban, corporeal landscapes. Touted by some as the “Israeli Banksy,” a label he personally finds to be a media-coined sensationalist oversimplification, Know Hope serves as the eponymous protagonist of Omer Shamir’s richly pensive directorial debut, Know Hope (The Abstract and the Very Real). Recent winner of the Best Israeli Documentary Award at Docaviv, the film offers an intimate glance at Addam Yekutieli, the thoughtful, unsuspecting, chronically-ill Israeli-American behind the pseudonym.

The son of a Japanese-American mother and Israeli father, both artists themselves, Yekutieli grew up in a white, Christian suburb in California before moving to Israel at the age of ten, not yet knowing how to speak Hebrew. In John Wilson-esque musings written and narrated by Yekutieli, we learn how this outsider came to embrace his differences and express them through street art interventions. “The strongest metaphors are the moments happening around us,” Yuektieli tells us, a belief fully leaned into throughout the film. 

An astute observer himself, Shamir (who directed, filmed, wrote, and edited the documentary) deftly utilizes numerous filmmaking techniques in this well-crafted character study. Having personally known Yekutieli for a decade, first as his assistant and eventually as a filmmaker, Shamir turns interviews and voiceover recording sessions into candid conversations. Spectacular moments unfold in real time – some during interactions with strangers engaging with his pieces and others in the background with those oblivious to them.

For an international project, he paints a line on a sidewalk or in a street. One side of the line says “OUR SIDE”, the other reads “THEIR SIDE,” leaving a crowd of random passersby to choose. Another painted line ata cobblestone spot overlooking the Western Wall: One side says “THE STORIES WE TELL;” the other, “THE STORIES THEY TELL.” Simple, yet thought-provoking, these interventions are not always welcomed, particularly by a more orthodox group of pedestrians in Jerusalem who go so far as to throw eggs at the words.

As awesome as it is to see Know Hope in process, it’s even more impressive when you learn he suffers from an autoimmune disorder that constantly causes inflammation all over his body, often resulting in debilitating pain. A tall, lanky, tattooed former skater, he chuckles when compared to the slender, hand-painted humans that appear throughout much of his work. Gangly, lanky limbs often extended in various positions with relation to their carefully curated surface, a heart in their hand or on their sleeve – Yekutieli wears his openly when we see him help repaint the wall of a home of a Palestinian friend in the Occupied West Bank.

Throughout the film, we follow as his work evolves and he inventively coalesces the personal with the collective with the political. As an attempt to bear witness to the atrocities in Gaza in the wake of October 7th, he meticulously puts together a project in which he meets with participants who pose for photographs showing their scars – his inspiration no doubt drawn from his own surgical wounds – and asks them to write him a letter sharing their stories and relationship with their body. The variety of magnificent pieces that emerge when combined with old maps featuring destroyed Palestinian villages, juxtaposed against living landscapes, is incredible. 

Know Hope is a moving portrait of an impressive artist, who blends the abstract and the very real in ways that activate curiosity and inquisitiveness, reminding us of the vitality of art as a means of resistance.

Ben Sharif is a Texas-based documentary filmmaker specializing in video editing and human storytelling, and a board member of Partners of Progressive Israel.