‘We Will Dance Again’ puts viewer inside the Nova festival massacre - review

Participants in the documentary film We Will Dance Again, shown at the opening of the National Library of Israel’s Docu.Text Festival in Jerusalem, received a standing ovation when they came onstage after the Sunday night screening – but this was unlike any other movie premiere in history. 

That’s because the movie, by Yariv Mozer, tells the story of the Supernova festival (aka the Nova festival) massacre, and the participants who took the stage were survivors and their families, as well as relatives of the victims. On October 7, over 360 of the approximately 3,500 attendees and staff at Nova were killed and about 40 were taken hostage – several are still being held in Gaza. Over 10% of those taking part in the festival did not make it home, and the vast majority never will. 

The October 7 massacre by Hamas is the most documented tragedy in human history, since virtually everyone involved had a cell phone and many recorded videos and messages, resulting in a wealth of material available. Mozer, who has directed such films as The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, and his crew had a different task from most documentarians: Rather than doing extensive research to find material, their challenge was to winnow down the huge quantity of video into a coherent narrative. 

The director handled the daunting task brilliantly, and the movie is compelling, harrowing, and heartbreaking from start to finish. There have been several previous documentaries about the brutal attack, most of them considerably shorter than We Will Dance Again, which runs about 90 minutes. Mozer masterfully weaves the interviews, video, and audio footage to tell the story as if it is happening in real-time. In no other documentary do we feel that we are there with them in quite this same way. 

That makes watching this film, which won two awards at the Doc Edge Festival, a more difficult experience than the earlier films, but also more affecting. It will be screened in Israel on Hot 8 in late September and in Israeli theaters. The film will also open in Los Angeles on August  23, and there will be screenings around the United States on August 29 and September 1. The movie will be shown on Paramount+ in the US in the fall, as well as in the United Kingdom on BBC on a date to be announced; and in Australia on the Nine Network. 

The movie was a collaboration among several companies from Israel and abroad: See It Now Studios, SIPUR, Bitachon 365, MGM Television (a division of Amazon MGM Studios), HSCC-Slutzky Communications, BBC, and Hot Channel 8. They clearly came together to make We Will Dance Again out of a sense of mission rather than to garner prestige, praise, or prizes.

VIP attendees

A number of VIPs attended the NLI screening, among them Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion and MK and former chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot. 

The movie shows the names of each interviewee almost every time they are shown, a wise decision because early on, I became so filled with tension it was hard to remember them the way I would have in an ordinary documentary. 

The movie opens with Eitan, a young man –  virtually all the interviewees are in their 20s – who started out at Nova and ended up in the so-called “Bomb Shelter (migunit) of Death” along the road. This was where Aner Shapira, a musician and artist from Jerusalem, heroically tossed back eight grenades thrown into the shelter by terrorists and was killed by the ninth. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is still held hostage in Gaza, was there too and had his arm blown off. 

Expressing the film’s overarching theme, Eitan says, “I’m never going to be the person that I was before the seventh of October, and I’m trying to figure out who I’m going to be now.” I suspect that this sentence was Mozer’s guide to constructing the film as he did because this is the truth about October 7 for virtually all Israelis: The massacre changed our perception of our country and of ourselves, and we are still trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces. 

The movie starts out the night before, with participants arriving at the festival, the location of which was kept a secret until just before the party. While some had a slight trepidation about partying so close to the Gaza border, they assumed the security would be good and went anyway. Several of the partygoers from observant families, one a friend of Aner and Hersh, talked about the awkwardness of leaving her religious family on the eve of the Simchat Torah holiday, a problem she and her friends had in common. 

But she and thousands made it to the party, got settled, took a drug or two, and danced till dawn. For those who have never been to a festival like this – they are also called nature parties – it will be eye-opening to see how elaborate the festival was, with mind-blowing lighting, video effects and pounding electronic dance music. 

With the dawn came the rockets, which some saw as fireworks at first. Few were truly that concerned about them because it’s a sad truth that there is nothing novel about missiles being fired at Israel’s South, something that has been going on for almost two decades. But they kept coming. “It was like a scream coming from the sky,” recalls Noa. 

You may think you know what happens next, but you’ve never seen the story told quite like this. Most piled into their cars, which created a big traffic jam. But it didn’t move and soon they realized why – those in the cars in front were dead, shot by terrorists. Not everyone got the message right away, some sat on the side of the road, waiting for the jam to clear, and blasting Bob Marley music. 

Soon, no one could be indifferent to what was happening, and the movie switches to the Go-Pro footage from the terrorists’ own cameras, which alternates with the footage shot by the partygoers. This aspect of the massacre has been described elsewhere, but it bears repeating that the terrorists are gleeful and full of joy. As Eitan says, they are smiling “like it was a game they had won.” Their demeanor reminded me of a group of spring breakers coming across a stash of unattended cold beer kegs. They had been promised a day of fun and they got it: Killing lots of people. 

Most of the footage documenting the most violent acts was filmed by the terrorists themselves and it’s not easy to watch, to put it mildly.

Several stories are told: a group hiding in a dumpster; people fleeing into the fields, looking for a place to hide; a resourceful young mother who survived by taking shelter in a refrigerator; and the so-called Bomb Shelter of Death where most were killed, from which four (Goldberg-Polin, Eliya Cohen, Alon Ohel, and Or Levy) were kidnapped, and a remaining handful survived the grenades and bullets. 

Almost as disturbing as the video footage of the murder are the recordings of calls made to the army and the police. The police, to understate the case, do not have a clue. When one guy tells the police dispatcher that his friends are dead, the man asks if they are bleeding, and he screams, “They’ve been killed.” Another dispatcher mishears and thinks the caller is asking for an ambulance to be sent to the shore of the Kinneret. 

One of the emergency services dispatchers instructs them to take shelter in Kibbutz Be’eri, not knowing that it, too, has been overrun by terrorists. Another guides them to the army base at Re’im, which has been taken over by terrorists. One soldier left alive at the base tells them to go into a fortified intelligence room, but for a few scary minutes – all of which was captured on video – those in the room do not let them in, as 10 or more terrorists advance on them, shooting. The door opens for them at the last second. 

Perhaps the toughest part of this documentary is the recollections and video from the six or more hours that those who survived spent in hiding. Lali recalls: “I thought that if the army and the police don’t come for so long, there is no more army, there are no more police. The State of Israel is gone.” Her conclusion is completely logical. 

The final section details the arrival of the first responders, who found gruesome scenes with dozens of dead bodies lying at the site of the Nova festival and on the roads. While to compare the massacre to the Holocaust is wrong, the piles of bodies in these clips do resemble photos from the liberation of the concentration camps, only in color. 

At the end, the survivors eulogize the friends and lovers they lost, as well as acquaintances such as Ruth Peretz, a disabled teen, and her father Erick; and such well-known figures from the trance-music community as Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa and Shani Louk, who were both murdered. The survivors don’t face an easy road to recovery. One young woman, we learn at the end, is speaking from a wheelchair. “I’m a victim of the Nova disease,” says Eitan. “Sleeping has become a mission.” 

While some of them do vow that they will dance again, it’s clear – tragically so – that it will be a very different dance.