Tomer Heymann is a contemporary Israeli documentary filmmaker. His film It Kinda Scares Me won first prize at the 2001 Haifa Film Festival, and 2006's Paper Dolls won first place at the Berlinale and was presented in competition at SILVERDOCS 2006. His 2003 film Fucked Up Generation was released theatrically in Israel.

Tomer spoke with Mark Adnum via email in July 2007.

MARK ADNUM: Paper Dolls is respectful to the girls of the title, but I can't help but think that if the Paper Dolls weren't so obviously out of place and, well, freakish, a lot of the film's impact would be lost. As a documentarian, how do you balance what must be an acknowledgment of your subjects' glaring eccentricities and a need to catch their mundane humanity?

TOMER HEYMANN: I believe that one of the things that turn a regular person into a documentary protagonist is the complexity you mentioned; on one hand the daily routine, almost boring monotony that the character brings, in the case of the Paper Dolls it's the banal work of cleaning and nursing the old men, and on the other hand the importance of breaking that routine and expressing other more unusual and eccentric aspects of oneself – like this group of five men who dress up with paper and feel the most festive and unique in the world. I try to bring in my films both these sides in a way that they don't cancel each other out, but in a way that the viewer knows and understands the tough daily routine of the Paper Dolls and enables to grasp the grandeur and glamour of this drag queen group. If we were not familiar with their everyday job, this phenomenon wouldn't be so extraordinary, as there were many films made on drag queens.

What struck me was how the elderly Jewish men in the care of the Paper Dolls seemed queerer than the Dolls themselves. Your film didn't really delve in to how such apparently conservative people responded so casually to such an unlikely situation - were you not particularly interested in this angle?

Practically the orthodox men were after a stroke that disabled them to fully communicate verbally. In that sense, I believe we learned something much more profound from their mimic and physical response to the Paper Dolls who took care of them. The pleasured expression on the old man's face when Nits gives him a head massage, communicates a much stronger emotional bond than an interview would have. Other than that, we're talking about a closed and conservative society of orthodox Jews who object any external media; they don't have TVs and read only ultra-orthodox newspapers, so I'm doubtful that they would have cooperated with me, a non-religious director.

Your films look at very flamboyant characters yet a little bit of yourself appears in each of them. I remember in Paper Dolls where you spoke briefly about being happily single - adventurously alone. How much of a documentarian's films are about themselves, rather than their subjects?

I can indicate about my self that a part of choosing to direct documentaries is also because it's apparently a kind of therapy for me. It's a process that I begin and don't know how or where it's going to end, but what is clear to me is that not only my characters will over go change, but me too. I choose my characters out of curiosity towards them, some kind of feeling that I develop towards them, which is dynamic and can change throughout the film, like with the Paper Dolls my relation to them originated from a certain rejection and even repulse and ended after a long emotional journey in true and exceptional love. There is no doubt that parts of me are represented in my characters in a way and since it's a documentary film, the relationship between the director and the characters create in a sense another character, so boundaries begin to blur and it's hard to distinguish which parts are mine and which are the characters'. I try to be aware of this complex dynamics and enable the viewer to accept the characters and me from the most clean and sincere place that gives the most realistic and direct experience.

Further to that, you are quite handsome and reasonably successful and talented. Do you date a lot? Are you just not the coupling type?

First, thank you for the compliments! As for coupling, I'm in a significant relationship over a year with a charming guy I met at one of the festivals abroad; it's a beautiful love that crosses oceans. Intimacy is important to me but also the need of independence and freedom and when all that comes together with my occupation that requires a lot of trips and devotion to new characters who take me to unknown journeys, not rarely they conflict. I'm still learning how to deal with that and find the delicate balance of being in a good relationship without totally giving up my needs.

Are you interested in telling non-Israeli, or non-Israel based stories?

As a documentary filmmaker naturally I find the stories in my close environment, in this case Israel. I am curious about exciting and important stories outside my country and I even had an interesting experience out of Israel, which is not sure to work out yet. The language is a central and significant matter when it comes to documentary work and sometimes can be a bit limiting but from my experience, when there is an emotional connection, the language and mentality differences really help the interest of the foreign director and enable him to ask the most seemingly trivial questions, where often the essence of things lies.

How did you respond to Spielberg's Munich?

I'm sorry to say I haven't watched Munich yet but I'm definitely happy and aware of the wave of films dealing with Israeli-Jewish subjects like the one about to come out: Adam Resurrected. It's interesting to see the different angle of the stories we all grew up on, the foreign eye has the cleanness that lights a familiar story in another light that often surprises me and teaches me more about how Israelis-Jews are experienced from the outside

How about Fox and Uchovsky's Yossi and Jagger?

Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky are good friends of mine who I love and appreciate their work very much. Yossi and Jagger is a film that made it in Israel and the world and expressed a different aspect of the military experience which is dealt with a lot in Israeli fiction and documentary films. The ability to articulate a homosexual world within a rigid and uniform militant world puts the sexual choice in an almost trivial, for granted place, and the perceptive and tender way in which Fox and Uchovsky presented it to the viewer enabled to accept this paradoxical combination wrapped with beauty and sensitivity.