‘We Will Dance Again’: Recording the nightmare of 7 October

Imagine filming yourself knowing you’re about to die.

A new documentary now streaming in time for the one-year anniversary of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack plunges you into this reality. It’s one of the most visceral docs you’re likely to see.

We Will Dance Again is a harrowing dive into the Hamas-led attack on the Nova music festival. Through videos shot on phones, GoPro footage attributed to Hamas fighters that were acquired by the executive producers and interviews with surviving festivalgoers, the viewer gets to witness both sides of a horrific event.

“It’ll be 20 million years before they understand what happened,” shouts a Jihadist on his motorbike.

Directed by Yariv Mozer, a former Israeli soldier who was one of the first non-officials to the scene of the tragedy, the documentary opens with an acknowledgement: “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians.”

Citing death tolls from both sides of the conflict, it adds: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

It’s an important caveat, as viewers may be tempted to dismiss this film outright as a piece of propaganda. Granted, a documentary released in time for the one-year anniversary of the tragedy that befell the 3,500 partygoers, which claimed 364 lives, injured many more and led to 44 people taken hostage, cannot be viewed apart from the politics and the active war. However, witnessing to better understand cannot be a question of binaries.

To watch We Will Dance Again and feel indescribable sympathy for the Israeli victims and survivors of 7 October does not equate to political bias or indifference towards the innocent civilians murdered in Palestine. It is an act of remembrance, a reminder of what is being lost: a sense of humanity.

We Will Dance Again is a horror film in the most immediate sense of the term. According to distributors, many potential outlets and film festivals did not want to show the film, worried about political fallout.

The creators have also reportedly resisted outreach from Israeli groups, including one effort by the Israeli foreign ministry to show the film at the United Nations – in order to avoid the possibility that We Will Dance Again be labelled a political film or used as propaganda. 

However, it is worth noting that the opening acknowledgement mentioned above does not appear when the documentary is screened in Israel.

Viewers get a timeline of how the attack was experienced at the music festival.

Some remember the rocket fire on the morning of 7 October.

“Wow, there’s fireworks,” “They really went all out this year!”

Only gradually is it understood that these are rockets foreshadowing the arrival of armed Hamas forces that would turn a place of partying into a killing field. 

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As the film unfolds, we see footage and hear from witnesses. Elinor Gambarian hides inside a refrigerator, with her selfie footage showing her terror as Hamas militants searched the grounds. Noa Beer recounts her escape by car. Partygoers hide in trash containers and a bunker with other corpses. 

CCTV footage shows a grenade attack and how Aner Shapira expelled seven grenades before being killed when one takes his life. The same footage shows how the lower arm of Hersh Goldberg-Polin was blown off. Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage and his body was discovered in August.

One survivor explains that he recorded on his phone because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Another describes it as “like seeing a horror movie with your own eyes”.

Then there’s the inclusion of recordings of some of the emergency calls made to the Israeli forces and ambulance services. The response time was nearly six hours, a surreal reminder of how the Israeli authorities’ failure to act quickly led some people to think that their silence led survivors to feel like they no longer existed.

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The delayed response goes unexplained, and there are many elements that We Will Dance Again does not discuss – including any context about the conflict. This will frustrate many, while others will understand that a massacre of this – or any – magnitude cannot be fully grasped from every angle.

Again, the one that Mozer chooses is not a political but a human one. His unflinching focus is on indiscriminate terror and how one lives with survivor’s guilt and trauma.

Moreover, it highlights one of the duties of a documentary filmmaker: no matter how hard, testimonies must be heard and victims remembered. In doing so, he reminds us of the countless lives that have been decimated on both sides of the conflict, the lives of young people whose only sin is existing.

In the documentary’s final moments, one of the survivors remembers his friends.

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“I’m hoping that wherever they are, they’re partying like crazy. And one day, we will, too.”

As much as there is a moment of hope in this testimony, one which gives the film its title, it’s hard to fully embrace that slightest instant of optimism – especially with the stomach-churning camera footage and the vivid testimonies that precede it.

We’re told that some who escaped the 7 October massacre have killed themselves. One man explains that his former self died that day and how many have to start again as different people. Hope doesn’t feel like something that can currently grow.

Produced by See It Now Studios, We Will Dance Again is currently streaming on Paramount+ and has been shown on the BBC.  

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