Nancy Spielberg: “We can’t let them silence our stories”
Ahead of the UKJFF screening of her film A Letter to David, Steven's youngest sister talks trouble in Hollywood
“When you have celebrities like Javier Bardem using words like ‘genocide,’ quoting figures from the [Hamas] terrorist organisation, or just spreading plain old lies — and those lies become ‘truth’ on social media because people don’t bother to look beyond the headlines — that’s a real problem.”
Nancy Spielberg is talking about Hollywood – a place she knows well, and where her surname carries immense weight. But the youngest sister of Steven Spielberg has built her own formidable reputation as a producer of hard-hitting documentaries, and she is deeply concerned by what she sees unfolding in America.
“From what I know and what I read,” she says, “Hollywood is having a battle within itself over this. There are lots of people who are closet supporters of Israel — and what happens is, they do get banned or cancelled. Soon after October 7, one of the biggest fights was what kind of statement the Directors Guild or the studios should come out with. They said, we’ve got to be fair. You had to denounce terror, support Israel, and also say you felt horrible for innocent Palestinian lives that were lost. You couldn’t just say one thing.”
“In America, when it was Black Lives Matter or the MeToo movement, God forbid you should say all lives matter. But Jews don’t get that. We don’t get to stand in the spotlight and say, right now it’s about us. Because as soon as we defended ourselves, we were not the victims any more.”
Spielberg is speaking ahead of the UK Jewish Film Festival screening of her latest project, A Letter to David — an extraordinary film directed by Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval. The documentary began as a response to the Hamas attacks of October 2023, when Shoval revisited his own 2012 feature Youth to tell the true story of the Cunio brothers, who were caught in the maelstrom of that horrific day.
David Cunio and his twin, Eitan, had been the teenage stars of Youth, a fictional story about two brothers staging a kidnapping to help their financially struggling parents. A decade later, the real-life brothers were living on Kibbutz Nir Oz when Hamas invaded. Eitan narrowly survived; David and their younger brother Ariel were taken hostage and held in Gaza for more than two years.
After their capture, Shoval discovered a box of tapes that David had filmed, showing life on Nir Oz — the close-knit community, the laughter of neighbours, and families like the Bibas, whose tragic fate the world would later come to know. Those tapes form the emotional core of A Letter to David, which premiered earlier this year while the brothers were still in captivity. On October 13, just last month, they were finally returned to Israel after 738 days as hostages. Shoval has pledged to revise the film’s ending once David himself has seen it.
Spielberg, who will join a Q&A after the London screening, recalls being in Israel when the attacks began. “We were evacuated back to the US — my daughter had a three-month-old baby, so I wanted her to be in New York,” she says. “Jake Paltrow (brother of Gwyneth) who’s a family friend, told me about Tom Shoval and what he was doing, and I said, ‘I’m in.’”
Known for acclaimed documentaries such as Above and Beyond (about Jewish-American pilots who helped found Israel’s Air Force), Vishniac (on the pre-Holocaust photographer Roman Vishniac), and Closed Circuit (about a 2016 Tel Aviv terror attack), Spielberg has made it her mission to ensure Jewish stories are told — even as that becomes harder in the post-October 7 world.
“I felt that the question of who are the victims was not being addressed,” she says of A Letter to David. “And I also believed that the film needed a pair of eyes that was not Israeli.”
Not everyone welcomed the result. Although the film was well received at Berlin’s International Film Festival in January, Spielberg and Shoval were stunned when a UK festival invited them — then rescinded the invitation.
“The reasons they gave were that they were literally being terrorised by the prospect of violent demonstrations. How tragic it is that they succumbed. But people aren’t brave,” she says. The same festival, she adds, cancelled another unrelated film simply because it was perceived as Israeli.
Undeterred, Spielberg continues to push Jewish storytelling forward. “We’re being cancelled for many reasons and it’s really tough to find audiences now,” she admits. “But if we don’t make the films, then we’ve allowed them to silence our voices — and absolutely no way, no how.”
To help sustain those voices, she co-founded Jewish Story Partners with her brother’s Shoah Foundation and producer Roberta Grossman. “We can’t get funding,” she says. “The idea is that Jews need to understand what Jews are — because we’re lots of things — and people who aren’t Jewish need to understand that too, to find empathy. Because film is an empathy machine.”
Even major platforms struggle to draw viewers to these stories. “Paramount took a few films — We Will Dance Again, The Children of October 7, and Red Alert — but I was told that, even though they took them, there’s not a lot of viewers. We are toxic at the moment, and I don’t know when that toxicity will ebb.”
Spielberg laughs, calling herself “the unwilling activist.” Throughout her long career, she’s resisted trading on her brother’s name, though she acknowledges that now “the recognition helps — better this way, to do good, using my name to help my people. It’s the only way I can sleep at night.”
Her heart, too, remains in Los Angeles at The Milky Way, the beloved kosher restaurant founded by her late mother, Leah Adler. “My mom loved that restaurant,” she smiles. “On her last birthday, three weeks before she died at 97, we had a party there — Kirk Douglas came, she was smoking a cigar, and she was such a pisser!”
The family decided to keep it open in her memory. “We renovated it to look like her — denim, warm colours, and a home movie of her in what we call LeeLee’s Living Room. I get to oversee it. We do screenings, weddings, shevah broches — it’s for everyone, Jews, non-Jews, the Chasidim can eat there. It feeds everyone. The only thing my mom wouldn’t like is that there’s cilantro(coriander) in the guacamole. Sorry, Mom.”
And despite the weight of the stories she tells, Nancy Spielberg prefers to finish on a note of hope, quoting the late Rabbi Sacks: “We should go for less ‘oy’ and more ‘joy.’” For Spielberg, that philosophy applies to both food and film.
UK premiere of A Letter to David 5.30pm at the Curzon Mayfair on Sunday November 9, with a Q&A with Nancy Spielberg /ukjewishfilm.org/film/a-letter-to-david/
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