Moments from hell: Nova Festival horrors to be shown on BBC
Harrowing documentary to screen in BBC2 Storyville slot on 26 September
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
The tormented faces of the young survivors of the Nova festival massacre last October stay with the viewer, long after the conclusion of Yariv Mozer’s painful and powerful film, Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again.
Scheduled to be screened in the prime time Storyville strand on BBC2 on September 26, the film tracks the joy of the young, peace-loving party-goers as the music festival begins. And then the sun rises on the morning of October 7, and the celebrants see what they initially think are fireworks on the horizon.
But of course, these are not fireworks, but Hamas rockets, the harbinger of pure evil.
In this extraordinary 90-minute documentary Yariv Mozer has assembled footage from a variety of sources: from CCTV, from car dashcams, from Hamas’s own baleful and boastful livestream GoPro material, and above all, from the Tik-Tok and Insta generation, for whom no event was real unless they filmed it, real minute-by-minute terrifying records of the fear and suffering that enveloped the party-goers.
We hear testimony in English and Hebrew from the clearly still traumatised survivors. And in Hebrew, you hear one word repeated over and over — “shechita”. Slaughter.
As the film opens, some of the survivors are frank about the drugs they were taking to enhance the experience of the music and dancing at Nova. It’s a partial explanation of why so many were unable to come to grips with what was happening, as the Hamas murderers swarmed into the Nova festival site, many on motorbikes, shooting at random.
If we, the stunned viewers, can’t believe what we are seeing, how much more would that have been the case for the young Israelis and foreign nationals, part of a crowd of 3,500 gathered in the desert.
We also learn that a good number of those attending Nova were from religiously observant families. Some had attended a Friday evening meal the night before and had carefully evaded awkward questions about how they planned to spend Simchat Torah on Shabbat. And later in the film, heartbreakingly, we hear people convinced they are about to die, reciting the words of the Shema: “Hear O Israel…”
The young men and women are cheerful at the beginning of the film, talking about their friends, their travel down south to the Gaza Envelope, their love of music. One by one, they break down as they relive the torment of that awful day, talking about those who died around them, their losses and injuries, and the terror of how they ran and hid and survived.
One of the stories highlighted is that of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the 23-year-old whose arm was blown off in a grenade onslaught against him and his friends as they tried to hide in a shelter. He was kidnapped and later, sadly, one of six Israelis summarily executed by Hamas as IDF forces drew close to rescuing them.
The testimony comes from Eitan Halley, 28, who recalls taking refuge with Hersh and Aner Shapira, a British-Israeli musician, in a five-foot by eight-foot roadside bomb shelter, together with 27 other people. Hamas terrorists began throwing grenades through the doorway — and just as fast, Aner picked up the grenades and threw them back.
Eitan realised that eventually, he, too, would have to emulate Aner. He was painfully correct. Aner threw out eight grenades. The ninth killed Aner and blew off Hersh’s arm. Eitan took over throwing out the grenades. He barely remembers doing so.
He tells Yariv Mozer: “I remember seeing a terrorist walk in. He was wearing all black. He had a black mask on, an AK-47, and a green bandana on his head with the Hamas symbol. I remember you could see his mouth through the mask, like, he had a little opening, and he was smiling. Like it was a game that they won. They came back in…and then they started shooting everyone inside”.
We see Elinor Gambarian, a single mother of an eight-year-old boy, who she says is her entire reason for living. And she spends hour after terrified hour hiding in a fridge, but determined to live and survive for her son’s sake.
We see another woman whose smiling face at the start of the film belies the tragic loss of her partner, David. Noam and David hid in a waste container with about a dozen other people, as the shooting went on all around them.
Noam recalls having to stay silent to survive; not being able to scream or cry as she realised she had been injured and her boyfriend David shot dead: “One of the girls in the container raised her head and she shouted: ‘They spotted me!’ And some terrorist approached, and shouted: ‘Allah akbar!’ And there was a burst of gunfire.”
And then Mozer pulls his camera back and we see that Noam survived — but is in a wheelchair, due to her injuries.
Each story and testimony is almost worse than the next, but compelling and necessary to understand what Israel went through on that terrible day — the rapes, the murders, the kidnapping, the satanic glee of the Hamas killers. We hear the desperate calls to the army, police and ambulances, where the operators have no real idea of the scale of the emergency, and we relive the anguished attempts to flee Nova only to run into Hamas ambushes.
And the soundtrack is gunfire, and screaming. And there are bodies everywhere.
Yariv Mozer said: “I see it as my duty as a documentary filmmaker to bring to the world the testimonies and horrific stories of the survivors of this slaughter, those who are no longer with us, and the countless who are still captured hostages in Gaza, with their fate remaining unknown. These are young women and men whose only sin was their desire for music and the passion to celebrate free love, spirit, and freedom.”
He added: “It’s a story that needs to be told to honour the victims’ memory, challenge the darkness with light, and reaffirm our unwavering belief in hope, unity, and the enduring human spirit.”
Lucie Kon, Storyville’s commissioning editor, who is Jewish, said: “I am grateful to the young survivors of the Nova music festival who have trusted us to share their experiences of that terrible day, so that BBC viewers can get a sense of some of what they experienced. This is an important film. Director Yariv Mozer and the team have done an extraordinary job in telling this harrowing story.”
Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, says the BBC, forms part of a group of programmes marking the October 7 anniversary and the war between Israel and Hamas. Other programming includes the BBC Storyville documentary, Life and Death in Gaza, produced by BBC Eye, which will be shown on October 15 on BBC2, a Panorama special going out on October 7 on BBC1 and news coverage across TV and radio as well as a collection of curated content on iPlayer.
Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again is showing on BBC2 at 9pm in the Storyville slot on September 26
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