‘We Will Dance Again’ Revisits October 7th Tragedy
The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival hosted a preview screening and the film’s director at the Tara Theatre.
Hundreds of young people were still dancing when the sun came up over the Nova Music Festival on the morning of Oct. 7 of last year.
If you were young and looking for a good time at the tail end of the Jewish holiday season this was a way to celebrate life and love and beauty. But starting at 6:29 that morning for the 3,500 that were celebrating just a few miles from the border with Gaza, everything changed.
The new documentary, “We will Dance Again,” is an hour-by-hour recreation of the horror those thousands of young people faced as they woke up to the possibility that they would not live through the day.
The distinguished Israeli filmmaker, Yariv Mozer, has pieced together the reaction of these young people as they faced death. From dramatic cell phone videos that many of them created, sometimes as their final act, Mozer takes us on the open roads where many of them died and to the hiding places in bomb shelters, trash dumpsters and darkened refrigerators where they struggled to live. Before the day came to an end, 405 were dead, another 45 were dragged off as hostages in Gaza.
Some of his own footage, taken at the music festival site just a few days after the attack, is also included. There’s a twisted and dusty boot here, a pair of broken eyeglasses there, mute testimony to the carnage that had descended when the music stopped and the killing began.
As Mozer stood talking to the AJT in the lobby of the Tara Theatre, which hosted the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival screening, he reflected on the past 10 months he had spent in the editing room creating these moments of life in the balance.
“I always ask myself if I’m as emotionally attached as I watched it for the first times. I want those who watch this film to be emotionally attached to the survivors and their stories and to understand emotionally what happened there. I want them to feel what it was like to be there.”
And for an hour and a half, as the images flit by, sometimes badly askew or out of focus, we are drawn in. In a few unbearable moments we try to avert our eyes as a Hamas terrorist with a Go Pro camera on his forehead pulls the trigger, then runs forward excitedly to finish off a pair of young persons at point blank range.
The names and faces of those who survive come up on the screen, sitting on a plain wooden stool, set against a softly lit background, then fade away into more scenes of the carnage. Perhaps the most moving of the survivors is 28-year-old Eitan Halley. In a remarkably calm, but deeply emotional voice, he recounts how he survived in a migunit, a concrete bomb shelter just across from Kibbutz Be’eri, while Hamas killers tossed grenades inside. His friend, Aner Shapira, tossed eight of them back before the ninth ended his life. Halley, then, took his place.
“I remember a grenade flying in, just landing right in front of me, and you could see the flame coming out of the top of the grenade, and it was a few inches, and I remember it getting smaller and smaller, and I just picked up the grenade and threw it out.”
He lived but with haunting memories.
“I’m never going to be the person I was before the seventh of October, and I’m trying to figure out who I’m going to be now.”
This finely honed meditation on brutality and survival is likely to cause us to ask some of those same questions of ourselves as we face the future. If there is an answer to be found it may be in some of the brighter moments in this searing film. Despite his pain Eitan Halley speaks of a better day tomorrow.
“I close my eyes for a moment, and I picture my friends that aren’t with us anymore and hoping that wherever they are, they’re partying like crazy, and that one day we will, too.”
While the horrific scenes in this film are likely to stir in our memory for some time, it is Yariv Mozer’s belief that the music will stir us again, as it did these young people on that early October morning last year.
“And I think that is something very unique to the Jewish people in general,” Mazer said. “It’s something very, I think Jewish, that we will dance again, we will be able to dance again.”
“We Will Dance Again” is currently streaming on the Paramount+ platform.
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