TORONTO-Israeli director Eytan Fox says he has a tough time summarizing the plot of his new movie, Walk on Water, but he loves talking about the theme: what it means to be an Israeli man.

"I've been dealing a lot with masculinity, and Israeli masculinity in particular," Fox says. "When I was a child, the man I expected to grow up to be is a very certain kind of man. The man that Eyal, the Mossad agent in the film, represents is very self-confident, is very sure of his way, of our way; you know: strong, macho. A man who doesn't cry. A man who doesn't express emotion. And that is something that was sitting on my shoulder and sits on the shoulder of many people who grew up in Israel, and I think that really kind of screws up a lot of people's lives."

After former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak saw Walk on Water, he ran into Fox (Yossi & Jagger) at a party. Fox deepens his voice to impersonate Barak: "We saw the movie, Eytan, and I thought it was very interesting. There's a lot of things to talk about."

Fox drops back into his own voice. "He's supposedly from the left wing and the Labour Party, but he's also that kind of man. He's been in a commando unit, not Entebbe but he did other big things where he rescued planes. So just for these men to see this movie and kind of deal with the way it portrays them”¦" Fox pauses a moment. "Women in Israel love this film. You can see that men appreciate it, but women are really”¦" He sighs theatrically to mimic the response he's been getting. "They're saying, 'Yes, yes, you're saying exactly what we've been telling for years about our men, and you're suggesting that these men can change.'"

Eyal, played by Israeli star Lior Ashkenazi (Late Marriage), romances a German woman (Caroline Peters) living on a kibbutz and befriends her gay brother (Knut Berger) in order to find and assassinate their grandfather-a Nazi war criminal. The story takes place in Israel and Germany and was an Israeli-German coproduction.

Sitting on the patio at the Hotel InterContinental as he prepares for his film's North American premiere at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, Fox says that with Walk on Water, opening Friday (March 18), he wanted to make a new kind of Holocaust movie, but it wasn't easy to get off the ground. "People are used to very specific ways of telling Holocaust stories," Fox says, "Very sad, very gloomy. And suddenly someone is saying, 'No, this is going to be a film about young people talking about music, about sports, about sex, and, yes, talking also about the Holocaust and their personal histories and their families and this mishmash of what our lives really are.'?"

Fox was born in America, but his family moved from Manhattan to Israel when he was three. His mother stayed connected to her homeland by subscribing to the New Yorker, and Fox suspects it was reading Pauline Kael's movie reviews from the age of 12 that sparked his love of film.

In 1988, he met writer Gal Uchovsky-Walk on Water's screenwriter and coproducer-and they've been partners ever since. "We moved in to?gether 16 years ago," Fox says. "He's a well-known journalist in Israel." Uchovksy also wrote for Fox's Israeli TV series, Florentine.

After the success of Florentine, Fox went to the U.S. for a year, found an agent, and met TV producer Tom Fontana (Oz). "Things were happening, but then I realized I was lying to myself in many ways because I was cutting myself off from so many things that were so important for my work: my childhood memories, the scenery I grew up in, the language. I'm okay with English, but in Hebrew I feel that I'm really saying exactly what I have to say and want to say. And the music, it's so important to me. I get this hip-hop thing and the rap thing, but where are my old-fashioned Israeli songs?"

So Fox returned to his songs and to make Walk on Water. "I think people should deal with issues they feel very close to and that are very close to their language, their music, their landscapes," Fox says. "Not everyone looks like Meg Ryan or speaks how they do in Friends."

Although Fox is delighted the former Israeli prime minister saw his film, he's hoping the current one, Ariel Sharon, will see it too. "You see, Sharon, Barak-they are Eyal, they are the main character of the film. And I'd love to sit down and show Sharon the film and sit down and talk to him about it and say we really have to change in a very deep way. And we have to stop being afraid. And we have to open ourselves up completely. And that's the only way for our society and our reality to change."