“We Will Dance Again,” one of the first major documentaries about October 7, specifically the Nova Party attack, is now streaming on Paramount+. The movie was directed by Yariv Mozer, the incredible documentarian behind “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” and like that astounding series, it offers an unprecedented and harrowing look into a chapter that forever changed Jewish history, except this chapter is not quite a year old.
“Nothing prepared me for the harsh images I saw in the remains of the massacre at the Nova music festival just a few days after October 7th,” Mozer said in a press release. He was almost immediately astounded by denials about the tragedy, which he saw circulate online and elsewhere “even before the echoes of the screams faded into the abyss.”
Mozer felt he had a clear duty as a documentary filmmaker to tell an unembellished tale about the truth of that day, to counter all the fake news and the “torrent of falsehoods.” He did so by focusing his camera on the survivors and some of those who didn’t survive, making them “the film’s heroes.”
The film contains personal recordings taken on the phones and devices of those who went to the festival that day, videos that Hamas body cameras captured and released, voice messages left by participants to their loved ones and shots from surveillance cameras in the area.
There are the stories of victims who became legends, like Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was murdered by Hamas after over 10 months in captivity, and his childhood friend Aner Shapira, who lost his life trying to protect fellow festival-goers by throwing grenades out of the shelter they took refuge in, the same shelter where Hersh was captured. Their friend Eitan, who was in the shelter with them, talks to the camera — he’s the one who took over the duty of throwing out those grenades after watching Aner perish. There is Noa, the first one to call Tzeva Adom — red alert — on that day at the festival and halted the festivities. There’s a young single mother who hid in a fridge, filming a final testimony for her son. There are many who watched loved ones — friends, significant others — die before their eyes.
“It’s a story that needs to be told to honor the victims’ memory, challenge the darkness with light, and reaffirm our unwavering belief in hope, unity, and the enduring human spirit,” Mozer shared.
