For many people, the horrors of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel reside in the imagination. Some of the raw footage of the mass murder and abductions that happened that day, miles from the Gaza border after Hamas militants poured in on motorcycles and hanging from vehicles while waving AK-47s and firing at anyone in their path, was seen in part, scattered in snatches across news reports and social media. What was shown to the public last year was brief for obvious reasons. The footage was captured via cell phones of festivalgoers of the Nova Music Festival, or through CCTV footage outside roadside fallout shelters or dashcam video before their abrupt endings, at which point over 400 music lovers were murdered or kidnapped.
With We Will Dance Again, out on Paramount+ on Sept. 24, director Yariv Mozer created a narrative of the events as seen by the victims on Oct. 7, as the 3,500 attendees at the open-air music festival in the Negev desert emerged from a night of drugs, dancing and trance music to see rockets across the sky, only to then slowly realize they were sitting ducks in what would become a killing field. Mozer managed to get cell phone footage recorded by festival attendees as they fled for their lives, along with a halfway-point surprise of the inclusion of footage from Hamas’ GoPro cameras strapped to its militant fighters. With this footage, he has created a document of the unimaginable, with images from both sides of the horror that begat the Israel-Hamas War still going on today.
To tell anyone that this documentary is not for the faint of heart is an absolute understatement.
Mozer tells the Nova massacre story as a white-knuckle action thriller, interviewing about a dozen survivors of the attack — all of whom are in their 20s — to detail their fear, pain and, to an extent, their hopes for the future. On Thursday when screening the film at a Manhattan Temple, Mozer explained his early decision to angle the film on a youthful group of survivors.
“[They are] so beautiful, young, young in spirit. Naive, in a way,” the director told the near-capacity crowd gathered at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center on the Upper East Side, including The Hollywood Reporter. “They came with all their innocence to this party for love and peace and freedom. And faced the most evil humanity could bring on that day.”
As the horror unfolds over about an hour of the film’s runtime, viewers hide inside a fridge with one woman, selfie footage filming her terror as Hamas militants stalk the festival grounds and fire their AK-47s; see cell phone video taken by fleeing festivalgoers, some who share that they were still high on acid or ecstasy from the night before; catch glimpses in festivalgoers’ footage, as they flee in terror, of others being picked off by bullets; bodies, so many of them, are seen lining the road after a traffic jam becomes a line of easy targets as Hamas militants rushed in.
Some of the footage and people may be familiar. A smiling Shani Louk, dancing and enjoying the festival, is seen here, hours before militants took her into Gaza. Hamas footage from that day seemed to show Louk unconscious on a truck and on Oct. 31, she was declared dead when a bone fragment from her skull was found. Later, an extended sequence of CCTV footage captures the moments of remarkable bravery when Aner Shapira expelled Hamas grenades, seven in total, from a fallout shelter housing terrified festivalgoers; he died when one exploded and also blew off the lower arm of American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was then taken hostage; his body was discovered by the Israeli Defense Forces in August, days after his parents pleaded for his return at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Goldberg-Polin’s story should be burnt into the minds of anyone who heard his parents’ pleas for his release over the nearly 11 months he was held captive in Gaza. Mozer’s film puts this unimaginable moment of his life and many other harrowing, cruel and hard-to-stomach moments of terrible loss and incredible bravery, on the record. His subjects articulate the dead-eyed fear and deep confusion many of them can not shake about what happened to them that day; the emotional spectrum of these young Israelis stretches from shell-shocked to rage-filled to affable to ashamed. Watching them share their stories, viewers can smile as they learn of a festivalgoer not wanting his mom to find out from his interview here that he took drugs the night at the festival, and audiences are just as likely to wince later, as another survivor explains how he doesn’t want his mother to see his skinned remains on Telegram, hanging from a tree.
As the title suggests, Mozer seeks to find some hope in all of the death and shattered lives, but that’s a hard sell for him to close in the documentary’s final moments, after everything that’s just been shown. If the film’s audience is left with deep sadness or blind anger, it may be because some key questions go uninterrogated in We Will Dance Again. Viewers learn in the film that it took the IDF a full six hours to respond as so many calls for help were made by these young people, screaming into their phones while fleeing Hamas bullets or hiding in garbage bins and bushes. Mozer opts not to get into this, or the refusal by Israel to launch an investigation into the holdup.
At the screening in New York, after sharing that he has no idea how a collaborator on his film acquired the Hamas footage that creates the film’s wild reverse shot on the situation at hand, Mozer suggested that this delay in rescue teams was due to the difficulty of mobilizing young soldiers “scattered all over the country” on a day of Shabbat, but conceded there are “still questions that we are waiting to be answered.” For the sake of its subjects, his film, a document of absolute horror, should help that effort.
We Will Dance Again premieres Sept. 24 on Paramount+.
