Amir – one of the creators – saw his life falling apart during the Gaza war following October 7th. The series draws inspiration from his experiences. He served roughly 120 days in reserve duty, returning again and again despite mounting personal costs.
Borderlines wants to capture something elusive about life in the midst of war. Something primarily mental: Not trauma in the classical sense, but rather a general eclipse - a loss of faith in the normal, the normative, the institutional, and a turn toward the intuitive and non-routine.
The series creates a tone simultaneously hyper-realistic and raw, yet touched with surrealism. A world where the psyche of our characters is reflected in reality and vice versa. The constant sensation is one of blurred lines between consciousness and reality.
We express this through constant mixing of worlds: real combat in ambushes blended with the protagonist's son's Minecraft battles, where he suffers virtual bullying. The domestic world finds its way into Gaza's heart: a vision of a Bat Mitzvah girl sitting amid wedding hall ruins.
The aesthetic trades gray urban combat grit for the hyper-saturated, hallucinogenic palette of a "sunrise set" gone wrong at a rave party. Battlefield dust merges indistinguishably with festival dust. Tanks breathe like massive dystopian art installations, tunnel networks feel like descents into the subconscious.
This is a world where authorities have abdicated, where everyone discovers the opposite of what they believed about themselves. Like Ari, a reservist from a religious-Zionist background - a cardiac surgeon who finds himself hauling a generator to save patients in a hospital after his own unit cut the power, knowing some of those patients are likely connected to Hamas.
Within a psychological war drama, we create a personal, nuanced tone steeped in the experiences, crises, and insights emerging from friction with this reality.