For many people, the horrors of the October 7 attacks in Israel reside in the imagination. Some of the raw footage of the mass murder and kidnappings that took place that day, miles from the Gaza border after Hamas militants descended on motorcycles and hung from vehicles while brandishing AK-47s and shooting anyone in their path, has been seen in parts, scattered in fragments across news reports and social media. What was shown to the public last year was brief for obvious reasons. The footage was captured on the cellphones of festival-goers at the Nova Music Festival, or on CCTV outside roadside bomb shelters or dashcam footage before its abrupt conclusion, when more than 400 music lovers were murdered or kidnapped.
With We will dance again, out on Paramount+ on September 24, director Yariv Mozer has created a narrative of the events seen by the victims on October 7, when the 3,500 attendees of an open-air music festival in the Negev Desert emerged from a night of drugs, dancing, and trance music to see rockets streaking across the sky, only to slowly realize they were sitting ducks in what would become a killing field. Mozer managed to obtain cell phone footage from festival-goers as they fled for their lives, along with a surprise midway 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 has spawned the war between Israel and Hamas, which is still raging today.
To tell anyone that this documentary is not for the faint of heart is an understatement.
Mozer tells the story of the Nova massacre like a chilling action thriller, interviewing about a dozen survivors of the attack, all in their 20s, to detail their fear, their grief and, to some extent, their hopes for the future. At a screening of the film at a Manhattan temple on Thursday, Mozer explained his initial decision to focus the film on a group of young survivors.
“[They are] so beautiful, young, young in spirit. Naive, in a way,” the director told the nearly full 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 celebration for love, peace and freedom. And they faced the worst that humanity could bring that day.”
As the horror unfolds over the course of the film’s roughly hour-long running time, viewers hide inside a refrigerator with a woman, filming her terror with selfies as Hamas militants mill around the festival grounds, shooting with their AK-47s; watch cellphone videos shot by fleeing festival-goers, some of whom say they’re still high on acid or ecstasy from the night before; glimpses in footage of festival-goers fleeing in terror, others being hit by bullets; see bodies, so many, lining the road after a traffic jam turns into a line of easy targets as Hamas militants rush in.
Some of the footage and people may look familiar. Here, a smiling Shani Louk is seen dancing and enjoying the festival, hours before militants took her to Gaza. Hamas footage from that day appeared to show Louk unconscious in a truck, and on October 31, she was pronounced dead when a bone fragment from her skull was found. Later, a long sequence of CCTV footage captures moments of extraordinary bravery as Aner Shapira ejected Hamas grenades, seven in total, from a bomb shelter housing terrified festival-goers; 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 Israel Defense Forces in August, days after his parents pleaded for his return to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Goldberg-Polin’s story should be seared into the minds of anyone who listened to his parents’ pleas for his release during the nearly 11 months he was held captive in Gaza. Mozer’s film puts this unimaginable moment in his life on record, along with many other heartbreaking, cruel, and hard-to-swallow moments of terrible loss and incredible courage. His subjects express the blind fear and deep confusion that many of them cannot shake at what happened to them that day; the emotional spectrum of these young Israelis runs from shock to anger, from compassion to shame. Watching them share their stories, viewers may smile when they learn of a festival-goer who doesn’t want his mother to find out from his interview here that he took drugs on festival night, and audiences are just as likely to flinch later when another survivor explains how he doesn’t want his mother to see his flayed remains on Telegram, hanging from a tree.
As the title suggests, Mozer tries to find some hope in all the death and ruined lives, but it's hard for him to find closure in the documentary's final moments after everything that's just been shown. If the film's audience is left with a deep sadness or blind rage, it may be because some key questions aren't being addressed 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 men, screaming into their phones as they fled Hamas bullets or hid in garbage bins and bushes. Mozer chooses not to go into this, or Israel’s refusal to launch an investigation into the robbery.
At the New York screening, after saying he had no idea how a collaborator on his film acquired the Hamas footage that creates the film’s wild reverse shot of the situation at hand, Mozer suggested that the delay in rescue teams was due to the difficulty of mobilizing young soldiers “scattered across the country” on a Shabbat day, but admitted that there were “still questions that we’re waiting to be answered.” For the sake of his subjects, his film, a document of absolute horror, should aid that effort.
We will dance again debuts September 24 on Paramount+.