“We Will Dance Again” premieres on Docu.Text and honors Nova survivors – Israeli Culture
Participants of the documentary We will dance againwhich was shown at the opening of the Docu.Text Festival at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, received a standing ovation when it took the stage after the screening on Sunday evening – but this was unlike any other film premiere in history.
That’s because Yariv Mozer’s film tells the story of the massacre at the Supernova Festival (also known as the Nova Festival), and the participants who took the stage were survivors and their families, as well as relatives of the victims. On October 7, over 360 of the approximately 3,500 Nova attendees and staff were killed and about 40 were taken hostage – some of whom are still being held in Gaza. Over 10% of the festival attendees never made it home, and the vast majority will never make it back.
The October 7 Hamas massacre is the best documented tragedy in human history, as virtually everyone involved had a mobile phone and many recorded videos and messages, so there is a wealth of material available. Mozer, who has directed films such as The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapesand his team had a different task than most documentary filmmakers: instead of conducting extensive research to find material, their challenge was to reduce the huge amount of video material into a coherent narrative.
The director has mastered this difficult task brilliantly, and the film is gripping, harrowing and heartbreaking from beginning to end. There have already been several documentaries about the brutal attack, most of them significantly shorter than We will dance againwhich lasts about 90 minutes. Mozer masterfully combines interviews, video and audio to tell the story as if it were happening in real time. In no other documentary do we feel like we are there in this way.
That makes watching this film, which won two awards at the Doc Edge Festival, a more difficult experience than the earlier films, but also a more poignant one. It will be shown in Israel on Hot 8 and in Israeli theaters in late September. The film will also premiere in Los Angeles on August 23, and there will be screenings in the United States on August 29 and September 1. The film will be shown in the United States on Paramount+ in the fall, as well as in the United Kingdom on BBC on a date to be announced and in Australia on Nine Network.
The film was a collaboration between several companies from Israel and abroad: See It Now Studios, SIPUR, Bitachon 365, MGM Television (a division of Amazon MGM Studios), HSCC-Slutzky Communications, BBC and Hot Channel 8. They obviously joined forces to We will dance again out of a sense of mission rather than to gain prestige, praise or prizes.
VIP participants
Numerous VIPs attended the NLI screening, including Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion and MK and former Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot.
In the film, the names of all interviewees are mentioned almost all the time, a wise decision, because at the beginning I was so tense that I could hardly remember the names as would have been the case in a normal documentary.
The film begins with Eitan, a young man – practically all the interviewees are in their twenties – who started at Nova and lived in the so-called “Bomb Shelter” (migratunite) of death” along the road. Here, Aner Shapira, a musician and artist from Jerusalem, heroically threw back eight grenades thrown into the shelter by terrorists and was killed by the ninth. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, still held hostage in Gaza, was also there and had his arm torn off.
Eitan sums up the film’s overarching theme when he says, “I’ll never be the person I was before October 7, and I’m trying to figure out who I’m going to be now.” I suspect that line guided Mozer in constructing the film, because for virtually all Israelis, that’s the truth about October 7: The massacre changed our perception of our country and ourselves, and we’re still trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces.
The film begins the night before, as attendees arrive at the festival, the location of which was kept secret until shortly before the party. While some were a little nervous about partying so close to the Gaza border, they assumed security would be good and went anyway. Several partygoers from religious families, including a friend of Aner and Hersh, spoke about the embarrassment of leaving their religious family on the eve of Simchat Torah, a problem they and their friends shared.
But they and thousands of others made it to the party, settled in, took a drug or two, and danced until dawn. Anyone who has never been to a festival like this one – they’re also called nature parties – will be surprised at how elaborate the festival was, with stunning lighting, video effects, and blaring electronic dance music.
With the dawn came the rockets, which some initially thought were fireworks. Few were really worried, because it is a sad truth that rockets are being fired at southern Israel, and have been for nearly two decades. But the rockets still came. “It was like a scream coming from the sky,” Noa recalls.
You may think you know what happens next, but you’ve never experienced history like this before. Most got into their cars, which created a huge traffic jam. But the traffic jam didn’t move, and soon they realized why – the occupants in the cars in front of them were dead, shot by terrorists. Not everyone got the message right away, some sat on the side of the road, waiting for the traffic jam to clear, listening loudly to Bob Marley music.
Soon no one can remain indifferent to what is happening, and the film switches to the Go-Pro footage of the terrorists’ cameras, which alternate with the footage of the partygoers. This aspect of the massacre has been described elsewhere, but it bears repeating that the terrorists are cheerful and full of joy. As Eitan says, they smile “as if they had won a game.” Their behavior reminded me of a group of spring breakers who come across a stash of unattended cold beer kegs. They had been promised a day of fun, and they got it: they killed a lot of people.
Most of the footage of the most brutal acts was taken by the terrorists themselves and is, to say the least, not easy to watch.
Different stories are told: a group hiding in a garbage container; people fleeing to the fields in search of a place to hide; a resourceful young mother who finds shelter in a refrigerator and survives; and the so-called bomb shelter of death, where most of the people died. Four of them (Goldberg-Polin, Eliya Cohen, Alon Ohel and Or Levy) were kidnapped, while a handful of others survived the grenades and bullets.
Almost as disturbing as the video footage of the murder are the recordings of the calls to the army and police. The police have no clue, to put it mildly. When a man tells the police dispatcher that his friends are dead, the man asks if they are bleeding and shouts: “They were killed.” Another dispatcher mishears and thinks the caller is calling an ambulance to the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
One of the emergency dispatchers tells them to seek shelter in Kibbutz Be’eri, not knowing that it too has been overrun by terrorists. Another leads them to the military base in Re’im, which has been occupied by terrorists. A soldier who is still alive tells them to go to a fortified intelligence room, but for a few frightening minutes – all captured on video – those present do not let them in as 10 or more terrorists approach them, shooting. The door opens for them at the last second.
Perhaps the most difficult part of this documentary are the memories and videos of the more than six hours the survivors spent in hiding. Lali recalls: “I thought that if the army and the police didn’t come for so long, there would be no army, no police. The State of Israel would have disappeared.” Her conclusion is completely logical.
The final section describes the arrival of rescue workers who found gruesome scenes with dozens of bodies lying on the grounds of the Nova Festival and in the streets. Although it is wrong to compare the massacre to the Holocaust, the piles of bodies in these clips resemble photos of the liberation of the concentration camps, only in color.
At the end, the survivors pay tribute to lost friends and lovers, as well as acquaintances such as Ruth Peretz, a disabled teenager, and her father Erick, as well as such well-known figures from the trance music scene as Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa and Shani Louk, both of whom were murdered. The survivors do not have an easy road to recovery. One young woman, we learn at the end, speaks from a wheelchair. “I am a victim of Nova disease,” says Eitan. “Sleeping has become a mission.”
While some of them swear they will dance again, it is clear – and tragically so – that it will be a very different dance.
