After a three-year hiatus, on September 8, 2026, Fauda 5 arrives on Netflix: the fifth season of the Israeli thriller series that is appreciated even beyond Israel and by an international audience. The clash with reality, and in particular what happened after the October 7, 2023 attack, could not fail to leave a mark on the plot, the evolution of the characters, and even the places where the series is filmed.
Marseille, which is one of the main settings where the action unfolds and which up to the previous season had been one of Fauda’s locations, for example, has been replaced with another European capital famous for its elegance and its modern spirit, and this is not the only upheaval that fans of Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz’s series must expect to see on screen.
What Fauda 5 is about
The pure action that characterized the previous seasons gives way in Fauda’s fifth season to psychological introspection. Doron, the main protagonist played by Lior Raz himself, two years after the October 7, 2023 attack, finds himself contending with a severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Several flashback scenes linger to recount how he and other characters in the series personally lived through what was effectively the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation and the ongoing escalation in Palestine that continues to this day. Although he resembles more of “a broken warrior than a warrior who always wants to go into battle,” as Raz has emphasized, Doron is drawn by a friend into a covert operation in Marseille, undertaken purely out of personal vendetta.
Where the series was filmed
As noted, Marseille is no longer among Fauda 5’s locations: a few months after filming began, the production announced that the filming would move to Budapest for security reasons. The Hungarian capital thus had the task of representing on screen the French city, despite the notable geographical and architectural differences.
Some views over the Danube have served that purpose. The center of Budapest was also involved in the series’ filming, especially in districts like Pest that embody the city’s more modern, innovative, and at times restless soul. It is here that fashionable boutiques and creative shops can be found for shopping, modern offices that make it the city’s economic heart, and buildings such as the Parliament Building that give this area of Budapest political-governmental significance.
The elegant buildings in the neighborhood, many of them historic, helped in the task of transforming the city into Marseille on screen. The presence of the Great Synagogue, inaugurated in 1859, could not fail to influence the decision to shoot the fifth season there: it is the largest in Europe, the second largest in the world, and can accommodate up to 3,000 worshippers.
As noted by several sources, among Fauda 5’s locations there are also some peripheral neighborhoods and urban suburbs of Budapest, chosen by the production to best represent Marseille’s modern, cosmopolitan, and at times chaotic and hard-to-predict spirit.
