In the past, it took years for Israeli filmmakers to dramatize wars they lived through. It was as if they needed time to make sense of them – understandably – and major movies and television series about the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War, for example, took decades to hit screens.
But October 7, 2023, and its aftermath are very different. Perhaps never in history has a massacre and the ensuing war that it ignited been filmed and viewed by so many, some of it actually in real time – when Hamas live-streamed its killings – and much of it just a few hours or days afterward.
Both the terrorists and their victims had cameras and documented what happened on that day.
Because of this wealth of video and images, filmmakers began making movies about October 7 at lightning speed.
After just a few months, two documentaries were released in December 2023: #NOVA, directed by Dan Pe’er, a movie composed of real-time footage shot by Nova festivalgoers, terrorists’ body cameras, voice messages, and other material from the day, with no traditional narration; and Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre, by Duki Dror, Noam Pinchas, and Yossi Bloch, which was made for KAN with international partners and combined survivor and first-responder interviews with real-time footage to reconstruct the attack on the festival.
Real-time testimony
Other documentaries soon followed.
Among the most notable were:
• Anat Stalinsky’s Screams Before Silence, presented by Sheryl Sandberg and which focused on sexual violence on October 7 and in captivity.
• Yariv Mozer’s We Will Dance Again, a major Nova documentary shown extensively abroad, which won a News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary.
• KAN’s ambitious, comprehensive five-part documentary series The Day That Never Ended.
• Eyes Wide Open, Noa Aharoni’s heartbreaking documentary about the border observers who were slaughtered and kidnapped.
• Ben Shani’s Table for Eight, a newsmagazine episode for Uvda that told the story of one of the youngest hostages, Abigail Mor Idan, and her family, which became a stand-alone documentary.
• Haley Geffen’s Safe Room, about a safe room of survivors who were transformed into a kind of surrogate family.
There are many others, and several more are in the works.
Fact to fiction
Two television drama series were also released in the two years that followed the outbreak of the war, both of which dramatized the stories of real people on October 7:
• One Day in October, created by Oded Davidoff and Daniel Finkelman, in which each episode told a single story, such as that of Inbal Rabin-Lieberman (Neta Roth), a young woman who led the Kibbutz Nir Am defense squad and kept the terrorists from overrunning the kibbutz.
• Red Alert, by Lior Chefetz, which wove together multiple stories of real people, such as Bat-Sheva Yahalomi (Rotem Sela), who managed to save her two daughters and herself and flee from Hamas terrorists, but whose son and husband were kidnapped. Her son, Eitan, was released in the first hostage deal, and her husband was killed.
Recently, the fifth season of Fauda was released in Israel on Yes and around the world on Netflix, and it was entirely focused on October 7 and its aftermath. The seventh and eighth episodes are flashbacks to the massacre and are so difficult to watch that they were released with a warning. That didn’t stop audiences around the world from tuning in and the fifth season made Netflix’s top 10 in about 40 countries around the world, and it even hit the top spot in Lebanon.
Two feature films were made quickly – one about real people, and one slightly fictionalized.
Stay Forte, by Doron Eran, dramatized the agonizing story of three hostages – Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samer Talalka – who managed to escape and were mistakenly killed by IDF fire.
Danny A. Abeckaser’s 12 Hours in October told the story of the massacre in English, trying to appeal to an international audience but sacrificing some credibility and intensity.
A cinematic turn
But after three years, finally there is a genuinely cinematic, complex, and moving film: Avi Nesher’s Our Loves, which is the story, according to veteran Israeli director Nesher, of “a group of people who thought they were having the worst day of their lives on October 6,” only to become trapped in the horrors of the massacre.
“The trick was to make a movie about people caught in a situation, not about the situation,” he said.
The characters are so vividly drawn you could almost forget early on that you are watching a movie that leads into October 7.
One of the heroines is a policewoman (Magi Azarzar) about to introduce her girlfriend (Hadas Yaron), a scientist, to her traditional Moroccan mother (Evelin Hagoel), who doesn’t know that her daughter is a lesbian.
There’s also a religious young woman, Sapir (Daniel Gimpel), who has just been dumped by a guy she hoped she would marry, and who has decided to rebel by attending the Supernova music festival. She ends up hiding with a drug dealer (Leib Levin), who keeps his stash in his underwear.
A retired general, Shabi (Shalom Michaelshwilli), sues his ex-wife to force her to sell their house, deepening the rift between him and his children, especially his young adult daughter (Noa Cohen). When the massacre starts, he grabs a gun and heads south to save her.
The latter storyline will remind people of several real-life stories of retired generals who took off to join the fighting, but it has a twist: Shabi is really a terrible father, and when he picks up four hopeless recruits to accompany him on his mission, he must redeem himself by becoming an instant surrogate father to them.
The movie was just shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it opened at the Haifa International Film Festival. It will be released in theaters in Israel on October 15, and it has attracted several big-name international producers, such as Danny Cohen of Access Entertainment and Fernando Szew of Fox Entertainment. This makes it likely that the movie will be distributed internationally.
Several upcoming films are about October 7, one of the most intriguing of which is the fact-based Tankistas: Wild Company, by Ayelet Menahemi, which stars Swell Ariel Or (who was also in One Day in October) as the captain of an all-female tank unit that fought terrorists for 17 hours. Its creators have promised it will dramatize the heroines’ backstories and their heroics.
Our Loves stands out among these dramatic films and series as a truly realized, complex movie. It has created a kind of template for those who want to dramatize this national trauma: tell a good story, and your viewers’ hearts and minds will follow. ■