"I can't, in any ordinary sense, recommend Yariv Mozer's 90-minute Storyville documentary, 'Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again'", said Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman. "It will destroy you; sleep was impossible for me afterwards."
But the film – part of a collection marking the anniversary of 7 October – is "astonishing". Featuring mobile phone videos from terrified festival-goers, interviews with survivors and Hamas bodycam footage, the harrowing documentary illuminates the "true horror" of the attack.
Preserved first-hand in "visceral detail", the film "unfolds much like a disaster movie", said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. One young woman "passes out inside the airless fridge where she cowers for hours", while a man is forced to hurl back a live grenade that is thrown inside the shelter where he is hiding. In each case, the chance of survival for these unarmed civilians seems all but impossible.
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There are "countless things that the film opts not to discuss". The delayed response from Israeli authorities following the attack is "barely" mentioned (it took hours for police to arrive at the festival), and the documentary provides "almost no context" about the wider conflict. While the footage included is "graphic and extremely disturbing", the film fails to "convey all the dimensions of the atrocity that occurred that day".
For some viewers this may be a "problematic omission", but the film's goal is "very clear": it shines a light on the experience of the "utterly defenceless" Israeli citizens at the Nova music festival that day, "and it does so unflinchingly, exhaustively and movingly".
Despite a caption highlighting the "catastrophic human cost" of the attack, neither the "bloody aftermath" nor the "staggering security failures" are Mozer's primary focus, added Jasper Rees in The Telegraph. His subject is "raw, pure, uncut" terror – "as it happened and as it is traumatically relived by those who saw it, felt it and were somehow hardwired to document it on smartphones".
In one of the most horrific clips in this "blistering" film, IDF footage shows a "massacre of the innocents among the Coca-Cola-branded fridges" by the main sound stage. For anyone planning to watch Storyville's upcoming sister film, "Life and Death in Gaza", this is an essential watch. "And, it should go without saying, vice versa."
