One of the scenes in "Mister Gaga" — the film by director Tomer Heymann that follows the dance career of Ohad Naharin, the world-class choreographer and 2005 Israel Prize laureate — shows Naharin having a conversation in a phone booth in New York in the late 1980s. During the call, he is offered the artistic directorship of the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company. Naharin has to choose between a promising and highly esteemed career in the capital of the world or a return to Israel. “It was a moment that stirred up sentiments, a longing and a certain feeling, and a sense of fragrance,” Heymann told Al-Monitor. “Ohad did not consult his wife or, in fact, anyone. He knew he was going back home.” For viewers, this is a critical moment.

Heymann's film, released commercially this month and already winning the Israeli public's heart — no mean feat for a documentary about performance dance — is a film about the art of dance and about a creative and prolific choreographer, “one of the most fascinating dance makers on the planet,” as a New York Times critic states at the beginning of the film. It is the kind of well-thought-out scene described above, skillfully inserted by Heymann, that makes the film a chronicle of what has happened to Israel in recent decades.

Naharin was born in 1952, four years after the establishment of the State of Israel, and grew up a native Israeli kid on a kibbutz, the stylized image of the good old Israel. His career reflects the chapters in the history of the country. In his film, Heymann includes archival footage of Naharin's idyllic childhood, full of joy and lightness, a happy child skipping and hopping and performing dance movements. Naharin's mother was herself a dancer.

The film then moves on to the days of Naharin's service in an army troupe, initially a cheerful lighthearted band, but not for long. The 1973 Yom Kippur War breaks out, and the band takes to the road to entertain shell-shocked soldiers on the front lines. “I remember the time, it was one of those shows we gave where I really wished I could just disappear,” Naharin recounts in the film. “We were forced to perform, while the trauma-stricken soldiers were ordered to watch us singing bad songs. It was theater of the absurd.”