In the first minutes of We Will Dance AgainIf we didn’t know what was going to happen, we could enjoy the enthusiasm of all those partying young people, about 3,500, who gathered at the Tribe of Nova festival, or Supernova, which everyone calls Nova. The location was known at the last minute: an assembly of tents, cabins and stages in a field in the south of Israel, just five kilometers from the border with Gaza. It was a summer day in the middle of October, that is usual there, and these boys and girls had left their families at Friday dinner, a serious thing in Jewish society, to get to the electronic music festival and be in tune before of dawn, which is when the party gets into its best. On Saturday, yes, they did not follow the mandatory rest. Many of those gathered admit to being high on ecstasy or acid, many of them belong to the LGTBI group, a father holds his teenage daughter, who is in a wheelchair, in his arms so she can participate in the dance. The festive story will suddenly become a horror movie: at half past six in the morning they begin to see an exchange of rockets in the sky, the DJ He immediately cuts off the sound and says, “Red alert.” Israelis in border areas see these things happening quite naturally (their Iron Dome usually repels projectiles), so some hurry to leave, but others prefer to wait to avoid the traffic jam. There they will be surprised by armed men in black, members of Hamas. It was the massacre of October 7, 2023: 364 festival attendees were murdered, more than 10% of those who were there, and 44 were kidnapped. Throughout the area, the terrorist attack that day caused 1,200 deaths and took 250 hostages.
We Will Dance Again (We Will Dance Again) is an urgent, creepy and very well produced documentary that Movistar+ has just launched one year after the tragedy. Directed by Israeli Yariv Mozer, it is a meticulous, minute-by-minute reconstruction of what happened that day. Told in an hour and a half like a movie, with the difference that everything is real. The footage weaves together recordings, most of them from mobile phones, made by participants in the party, by the security cameras at the venue and by Hamas militiamen who wore devices on their foreheads to film their supposed feat. We are only given respite by the interviews with survivors, who speak to us with serenity and anguish about their loved ones liquidated there, about how they were miraculously saved among piles of corpses, about how to start a new life with an enormous trauma on their backs.
It is not an easy experience to endure, nor advisable for sensitive people, but as a historical and journalistic document it is very valuable. We had never seen a massacre like this. We are becoming fond of the story of these boys, those who survived and those who did not. We will see point-blank headshots, roads littered with corpses, rows of stopped cars with no one alive inside, the escape of those who ran into the open field and fell into a macabre game like that of The squid game, the grenades thrown against the shelters. And the horror of those who hid in toilets, trailers or garbage containers, and the desperate calls to a police force that seemed impotent. The six hours it took the Israeli army to regain control of the area taken by surprise by Hamas in an operation as audacious as it was ruthless seem endless.
The documentary focuses on what happened at that festival. It is not intended to give the keys to a long regional conflict. We know what came after that atrocious attack: an escalation of brutality that continues to cause death and suffering in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Only some labels, at the beginning and at the end, provide context. It is said there, from the beginning, that the Israeli response to the attack caused some 40,000 deaths in Gaza; It is also explained that groups of victims have sued the security forces for their obvious negligence. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre and the subsequent war in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” we read.
Director Mozer explains in this interview with Toni García that some victims invited to see the documentary before its premiere had to leave the room because they couldn’t stand it. He says that he included harsh images, but avoided the very harsh ones. And he makes his position clear, very critical of his Government, in favor of a ceasefire that should have come “many months ago”, and the two-state solution. “I want to think that at some point, both in Palestine and in my country, the right people will come to power to put an end to all this.”
Of course this story is only part of the story, but it is true. Of course there are many other victims, those of bombings, raids, hunger, the demolition of their homes or forced displacements. Others will make the documentary of the umpteenth devastation of Gaza, and it will have to be Palestinian reporters because Israel does not allow international access. In the midst of the horror of a war that is expanding and with no end in sight, the victims of October 7 deserved to be remembered. Those on the other side, which are many more, too.
