A walk to remember: the out director of Yossi & Jagger talks about his latest film, Walk on Water, and its emotional triangle involving a gay German, his sister, and an Israeli secret agent.

Maybe Eytan Fox's shrink should get a story credit for the gay Israeli director's latest film. Walk on Water is the story of a straight, narrow-minded, unemotional Israeli Mossad agent who, after his wife's suicide, is assigned to find and kill an old Nazi responsible for the murder of Jews. Undercover, searching for clues, he poses as a guide for the German's grandson, a young gay tourist, and spies on the boy's sister, an emigre who lives on a kibbutz.

"My therapist told me about one of his patients, an agent in Shabak, the internal security bureau," says the cheerful Fox, director of 2002's acclaimed gay Israeli love story Yossi & Jagger. We are sitting in a cafe during the Toronto International Film Festival, where Walk on Water was well-received. "The man found his wife hanging in the bathroom," Fox continues. "She had left a note that he was impossible to live with. He went back to work immediately, repressing it, but finally began therapy. He left Shabak, studied literature and art history, and began an affair with a guy in his class.

"I understood why he needed this homosexual relationship to restart his life. He had never had anything emotional and tender happening. Then he met his lover's sister, fell in love, and started a family with her."

Fox, 40, is the son of American parents who immigrated to Israel. He feels that the Holocaust led his parents' generation to create "a new breed of Israeli--strong warriors, like the Baraks, the Netanyahus, the Rabins, and the Pereses. But they became emotional cripples. In the film I thought I would introduce the agent to someone who was the epitome of everything he is frightened of: gay, German, tender. Maybe he will be saved." Fox says that although "it's somewhat a love story," he decided to make the relationship between the men platonic. That doesn't preclude the hot scene where the two swim nude in the Dead Sea and discuss the pros and cons of foreskin.

Walk on Water, which was budgeted at $1.4 million, began arriving in U.S. theaters March 4, courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films and Roadside Attractions. It has a superb cast led by handsome Israeli star Lior Ashkenazi as Eyal, the agent, with the German actors Knut Berger as the young man, Axel, and Carolina Peters as his sister, Pia. In the film Eyal becomes very uncomfortable in a gay bar and exits in a rush. But Ashkenazi himself, who is straight, posed nude in Fox's arms for the magazine Time Out Tel Aviv.

"Lior is incredible," says Fox. "He told a newspaper that as a soldier he had had a relationship with a man. He said he realized that he missed having women in his life but that it had been a good experience."

Fox is best known abroad for Yossi & Jagger, set in the early 1980s. Its story of a relationship between two Israeli soldiers was inspired by the experience of a man who was friends with Fox and Gal Uchovsky, Fox's lover of 16 years and Walk on Water's producer and screenwriter. "It was also based on my fear during my service of being sent to war," Fox says, "as well as my fear of that kind of macho friendship between men, and how they make jokes about gays and you don't know what to do."

Fox says that the future project "most burning in my bones" is about the relationship between two men, "a new post-Zionist Israeli who thinks he's over all that Israeli stuff, but is not," and a Palestinian. The Israeli legally helps the Palestinian take on a new identity as a waiter in Tel Aviv. He's in love with the guy, "but it turns out to be crazy for the Palestinian, who loves the Israeli but hates him too. Eventually, the Palestinian toys with the idea of becoming a suicide bomber."

Working title? Romeo and Juliet.

Feinstein contributes to Detour and the U.K. newspaper The Guardian.