‘The story of October 7 will never end until the last hostage is released,” said Yariv Mozer in an interview in New York two days after his documentary, We Will Dance Again, which tells the story of the Nova music festival massacre, won an Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary on Thursday.
“Those guys who were in the migunit [outdoor bomb shelter] and spoke in the film, their friend, Alon Ohel, is still in the tunnels of Gaza. And he’s alive and we all know he’s alive,” he said, referring to several of the interviewees in We Will Dance Again, who fled the music festival and hid in a bomb shelter, where some were slaughtered, some were taken hostage, and some were rescued.
While most directors would sit back and savor their win, Mozer is still filled with the sense of urgency about the massacre and the remaining hostages that drove him to make the film, although he acknowledged that it was a huge milestone for him.
“The Emmy for me is a personal dream, as a filmmaker, as a TV creator,” he said. “But on this particular film, I felt it’s something bigger. It’s a national thing, but it’s more than that, because I think now the whole Jewish people feel that they’re under attack, you feel more antisemitism, and to get this kind of recognition for such a film is huge.”
He also spoke of his pride at the film being awarded a Television Academy Honor, a distinction given to just a few films a year by the organization that awards the Emmys, in May.
It wasn’t easy to create such an in-depth film about the horrific killing of more than 370 people at the deadliest single site of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, but Mozer is an eclectic and experienced filmmaker.
Early on in his career, he made the drama Snails in the Rain, about a student grappling with his sexual identity, and he has made documentaries on a wide variety of subjects, including The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, Golda’s War Diaries, and The Invisible Men, a look at gay Palestinians in Israel. All of his other work prepared him to make We Will Dance Again.
What is the structure and style of the documentary?
THE MOVIE is a cinematic triumph, a gripping documentary that meticulously presents a comprehensive account of the Nova, told from video and audio clips made by both the victims and the terrorists, mixed with interviews with survivors, as well as video shot by first responders to the scene.
While other documentaries and countless news reports have been made about the event, Mozer was able to structure the material in a gripping, suspenseful way.
He also got access to some of the GoPro footage filmed by the terrorists that no one else had. He artfully chose his interview subjects to illuminate every facet of the massacre – those hiding in the fields, inside the main festival venue, in bomb shelters, and much more.
The fact that it captivated the Emmy voters shows how well Mozer and his team succeeded in capturing that fateful day. He brought together a number of Israeli and international companies who backed the film: See It Now Studios, SIPUR, Bitachon 365, MGM Television (a division of Amazon MGM Studios), HSCC-Slutzky Communications, BBC, and Hot 8. It is available to stream in the US on Paramount+, and in Israel on Hot 8, Next TV, and Hot VOD, where it is the most-viewed title.
It had its premiere screening at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem in August 2024, which was attended by many survivors and families of victims and was the most emotional screening I have ever attended.
Mozer’s Emmy acceptance speech on Thursday night was also an emotional moment. He was accompanied by Yuval Siman-Tov and Tamir Leshetz, two of the Nova survivors interviewed in the documentary, as well as Natalia Casarotti, the mother of Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa, a 21-year-old who was murdered at the festival. An image of Casarotti-Kalfa has become a symbol of the tragedy.
Mozer dedicated his win to the hostages, and also spoke about one of the film’s producers, Michal Weits, who was injured in an Iranian missile attack in Tel Aviv.
She had taken shelter in the safe room of her house with her husband and children when the missile hit, and was hospitalized but has since been released, he said.
ON OCTOBER 7, Mozer instantly realized he wanted to document what was happening and spent that day texting army officials, “trying to get permission to go to the South.”
He related: “Two days afterward, I was already accompanied by a commando unit to the site of the Nova massacre, so I was one of the first allowed in. I was with a cameraman. They were all secured with helmets and vests, and I’m like, with nothing… The site was still untouched, you still saw bodies of terrorists. The majority of bodies of the victims were taken away on October 7 at night, but, for example, the migunit was full of everything you can imagine: objects, phones, body parts, hair. The smell was terrible; there was blood, flies.”
That evening, he contacted Emilio Shenker of SIPUR, who organized a pitch to MGM Studios. Mozer pitched to the studio the next morning and they accepted. “This was the fastest answer I’ve ever received for a pitch in this industry. This just doesn’t happen.” Later on, the other companies got on board.
After this early foray into the killing fields, he got to work on researching, assembling a team that went through the thousands of hours of video footage and finding survivors “who were able mentally to sit in front of a camera and tell their stories.”
The moments he feels were the most harrowing in the documentary were three executions carried out by the terrorists that were captured on film. “I wanted the audience to see what happened on October 7. I wanted people, especially outside of Israel, to see what Hamas is. To understand what terror is,” he said.
“You cannot call Hamas freedom fighters, legitimate fighters, or militants. These are pure bloodthirsty jihadi terrorists, making no distinction between Arab, Israeli, Christian, Muslim. This didn’t interest them. This was pure terror, and only when you see it with your own eyes can you understand what happened. To understand and get emotionally involved with it, you have to see it.
“Seeing a defenseless woman raising her hands and being shot at close range, it’s like nothing I’ve seen in my life, except the Holocaust… And in those moments, the Hamas terrorists were broadcasting live.”
The personal effects of making the film
Making the film took a toll on him, he said, and he is in therapy and struggles with insomnia, as do many of the crew members. “We all had months of nights without sleep,” he said.
“But I was never really thinking much about this. Because you think about the survivors, and some of them became my close friends. I’m in touch with many of the people in the film. And when you think of what’s their reality and what they go through, and their post-traumatic experience, how can you think about yourself?”
He is laser-focused on the goal, which he spoke of in his acceptance speech, of bringing the remaining hostages home.
“I wanted to raise a voice for the hostages who are still there, and this war is being fought on their backs, putting them at risk even more,” he said.
He described how he wasn’t sure he would be allowed to wear a hostage pin at the Emmys, and so also wore a yellow tie and a yellow pocket square. “We have to bring them back,” he said.