Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
Intense Witness testimonies and their filmed footage are essential evidence for what happened at the music festival on October 7, 2023.
By Nora Lee Mandel
WE WILL DANCE AGAIN
Directed and Written by Yariv Mozer
Producers: Emilio Schenker, Michael Schmidt, Gideon Tadmor, Orly Arbell and Ariel Weisbrod for SIPUR; Sheldon Lazarus, Ben Winston, Leo Pearlman, Ben Turner and Gabe Turner for Bitachon 365; Dari Shai, Rinat Klein Maron, Haim Slutzky and Dorit Hessel for HSCC/Hot Channel 8; Lucie Kon and Michal Weitz for BBC Four Storyville; Arturo Interian; Susan Zirinsky and Terence Wrong for See It Now Studios, and MGM Television
91 mins. Not Rated. In English, and Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles
As of September 24: Streams in the U.S. & Canada on Paramount+; in the U.K. on BBC iPlayer; on RTL Germany, and other platforms in additional countries
Mainstream media on October 7, 2024 was full of First Anniversary tours with grieving displaced residents through the burnt, bullet-ridden, even still bloodied kibbutzim devastated by the Hamas attack, with the bitter irony of the leftist, peacenik residents. As it has been throughout the past year, there was less coverage of the apolitical pop-up community that was the Nova Festival, even of its memorial and tribute to the 364 murdered on the grounds, and the 40 taken hostage from there. The significance of the documentary We Will Dance Again is now even more important, as essential evidence of this crime against humanity.
The intensely moving testimonies directly to the camera are threaded with an amazing array of footage, from several points of view, to recreate ‘As it Happened - Hour by Hour’. First, the 15 diverse young people – all in their twenties, as is stressed in their repeated identifications – set the context for the event. The Nova Festival was scheduled for the Simhat Torah national holiday, marking the end of the week-long Sukkoth vacation time, when transport is shut, people are dispersed, just before the start of school or back to work. Some of the Witnesses admit to sneaking away from their families’ observance. Israelis are so divided they can’t agree on this date that will live in infamy for them; even the more Orthodox, who were not among these victims, are uncomfortable with using a joyous religious holiday on the Jewish calendar (22 Tishrei) as another memorial day, which this year falls on October 24 in Israel so will be date-adjacent.
We hear why the Nova Festival attracted them and 3,500 others. Affiliated with the long-time Brazilian Universo Paralello, international DJs and electronica music enthusiasts attended; one of the Witnesses was a booking agent, another had intended to work there as a bartender. Other Witnesses thought of it as a rave, where it is typical that the location is only communicated to ticket buyers a day in advance. Smiling at the memory, they all came to be happy through dance. They were a bit surprised to see how close it was to the Gaza fence; at least one Witness lives in that region so saw rockets first appearing in the sky as a normal occurrence. Yet, as seen in the clearly labelled animated maps, Hamas in advance set up a pincer formation to surround the festival.
Israeli documentarian Yariv Mozer (Ben-Gurion: Epilogue, 2017), with his regular team of researchers, editors (Yasmine Novak and Roy Balbirsky), sound designers (Shahaf Wagshall and Zohar Shefa), and composer Tal Yardeni are experienced at integrating existing and historical footage with interviews and new visuals. Mozer was able to get on the site within two days, when the remains from the gruesome massacre were still visible. (Just a few images are blurred.)
Gen Z always has cameras and is used to posting on social media. Mozer’s team collected the festival-goers own footage from their mobile phones and what the Hamas attackers with GoPro’s posted on Telegram and WhatsApp. (The team was able to retrieve footage that Hamas later deleted when their images became too controversial.) Not only is the astounding use of different sources jaw-dropping, but how they are pieced together even minute by minute to confirm from a 360-degree perspective what the Witnesses report.
We see joyful, energetic young people, both “regulars” who were always the life of such parties (they become symbols of the Festival in the aftermath) and newbies just learning to join in the swaying to electronic DJ music. They all pogo a welcome to the sunrise as a spiritually peaceful experience. When the music is abruptly stopped, there is the confusion from a massive traffic jam blocking escape, and the fateful, arbitrary decisions to drive around, run through open fields, or hide wherever possible. We hear the recordings of their desperate calls to non-comprehending police.
The contrast between the festival celebrants and the attacking violent religious fanatics is chilling. The director sees the contrast as good vs. evil. In the Hamas-approved footage, the attackers rev up their engines with exultations of “Allahu Akbar” and pride at accomplishing “jihad”. Reportedly trained by the Revolutionary Guard Corps of the strict Iranian Shia regime that beats up Gen Z women for loose head coverings, the attackers could have seen the long-haired, skimpily-dressed young men and women (who were not only Jews or Israelis) as targets for their indoctrinated outrage against what some would call Western or “liberal” values. Their thrills come from casually committed murder with grenades thrown into shelters and automatic weapons aimed at the heads of the unarmed – at cars, portable toilets, fleeing and prone bodies. Documentation of historical attacks don’t have this immediacy, from antisemitic pogroms filmed by Nazi propagandists to individual assaults glimpsed on blurry CCTV. Surrounded by the sound of gunfire, some of the survivors are heard reciting their last prayer before their expected death. Hamas has justified slaughter of Israeli civilians because all serve in the military, but none of the Witnesses reference military service.
While the festival-goers here are open about taking psychedelic drugs, there are claims elsewhere that the excited, fast-moving killers were hepped up on some kind of amphetamines, like Hitler’s murderers were. But that doesn’t explain the exuberantly nasty welcome of the hostages by civilian Gazans of all ages as captured, brutalized young people, especially abused women, are filmed being triumphantly driven back through the broken fence. Sheryl Sandberg’s narrated documentary Screams Before Silence focuses specifically on the sexual violence perpetrated on women to counter denials that it couldn’t have been done by such religious men. Forty-five minutes of gruesome footage of the atrocities were exhibited by the Israeli military to invited journalists, political and community leaders around the world, but Mozer did not get official access to any video.
While Mozer’s team collected and processed footage, the director waited a few months until the Witnesses were ready to come into a studio and share their experiences. A psychologist was available for counselling at the sessions. More were filmed and their video utilized than were included in the final cut. The Israeli government has not yet started work on an announced formal investigation, though the National Library of Israel is collecting materials about all that happened on October 7th.
Near the end of the film, the camera slowly moves back from the intense close-up of one woman Witness to reveal the results of her wounds, as she maintains hope that her soul-mate held hostage is still alive. Tragically, the production had to add at the last minute the update on the murder of American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is seen in the film with his friends. The Witnesses start listing names of their friends and loved ones who were killed from the festival and can’t even finish them all. Two survivors joyfully re-unite. The names and photographs of all are montaged at the conclusion, while the title comes from the Witnesses’ own conclusions.
Mozer has noted that it seems every Israeli filmmaker is working on some aspect of the horror of that day, and what has come after for Israelis and others. For example, Talya Lavie plans a feature drama about the tatzpitaniyot, the female look-out soldiers whose advance warnings about suspicious activity near their border base were ignored. A Witness’s experience hiding at their overrun base is included in this documentary.
The version available to U.K. viewers is slightly censored. The BBC insisted that in the interstitial contextual text the attackers could not be referred to as “terrorists” but only as “Hamas”; the Witnesses’ testimony calling them “terrorists” is not censored. (BBC News programs always add “Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by Western states, including U.K.”) Mozer never refers to the attackers as “Palestinians”.
Apropos is photographer Lee Miller’s insistence at showing her first images from the Holocaust, as repeated in the recent Lee: “I Implore You To Believe This Is True.”
10/10/2024
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
To the Mandel Maven's Nest Reel Life: Flick Pix
Copyright © 2024