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EXCLUSIVE: In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Oscar-nominee Dror Moreh and producer Uri Shinar started working on a documentary that would show how everyday Israelis were transformed into “a collage of heroes” in the space of just a few hours.
On the anniversary of that fateful day, Deadline can reveal Even the Walls Cry, a feature almost solely created by volunteers that Fremantle has backed and will be selling at next month’s MIPCOM Cannes.
October 7 was one of the deadliest days of fighting ever in Israel, with around 1,200 people killed after Hamas launched its attack and 250 taken hostage – many of whom have either died in captivity or not yet released. By October 9, Shinar had “asked myself where I should be” and headed to a headquarters for hostages’ families, which had been set up by some friends.
Telling the ordinary stories of those who faced “crimes against humanity,” according to Shinar, was the goal, and his next move was to contact regular collaborator Moreh, a former Oscar nominee for 2012’s The Gatekeepers. “I called Dror and he said, ‘Whatever you say Uri, I’m in,’ and then we started rolling,” Shinar explained.
Incredibly, given that this was in the wake of an attack that had shaken Israel to its core, the pair were able to assemble a team of 135 volunteers without spending a shekel. The project began as a collection of short films and animations telling stories of the war, before 24 interviews were whittled down to four and Even the Walls Cry was the final product. “I was so shocked that all the volunteers kept coming back and thanking me for giving them meaning when they felt helpless,” Shinar said. Fremantle is selling globally, with any revenue generated from sales going towards offsetting project costs. Abot Hameiri is producer.
The movie features testimony from four victims and first responders, who witnessed the massacre and its aftermath. These are a farmer who helped rescue young people, a young survivor of the Nova music festival who took refuge in a shelter only to witness friends being murdered, an ultra-orthodox musician who volunteered to identify victims, and a mother whose son was kidnapped and taken to Gaza. A sentence uttered by the musician, who had seen 100 dead bodies in a single day, was the inspiration behind the name.
From the get-go, Moreh’s aim was to “tell the perspective of normal, humdrum people, waking up one morning and the most horrible thing that they could imagine has happened to them.”
“I didn’t want to speak politics,” he added. “I just wanted to create the human connection so that everyone who watches this film will ask themselves the question, ‘What would I do if I was in their place?’. Imagine being a mother with three kids, waking one morning and all of a sudden there are dozens of terrorists banging on your door and your son has been kidnapped.”
Moreh didn’t necessarily set out to represent a cross-section of Israeli society with his interviewees but instead wanted to show how “a collage of heroes” emerged within the space of one nightmare day.
A number of October 7 docs have been forged since last year including Paramount+/the BBC’s Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again about the music festival and a Sheryl Sandberg-fronted project detailing sexual atrocities committed by Hamas. Moreh and Shinar believe Even the Walls Cry stands out due in part to the speed at which they started filming.
“We did it so fast,” said Moreh. “The things that we saw on October 7 were so shocking that we wanted to keep the rawness of feeling alive, and this is why the moment Uri asked me to come I said of course.”
“Continuous trauma”
Yet while capturing those first few days was painfully raw, the pair believe the nation remains “in continuous trauma every day” over a date that Moreh says is now “burned into collective memories” akin to the assassinations of former Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, or JFK.
“Our kidnapped are still in dungeons in Gaza and recently six were murdered in cold blood in a tunnel so you can imagine this as a continuous trauma,” added Moreh.
He has directed a wealth of powerful docs about mass killings in the likes of Rwanda, Bosnia and Libya, while he made 2022’s Corridors of Power about American responses to genocide, and he described the immense pain when a filmmaker witnesses something akin to these events happening to your own people. “All of a sudden you find yourselves in a horror movie,” he said. “We have to ask ourselves about the human capacity for barbarity. Where do we lose that empathy?”
He noted that this can work both ways. Since October 7, the Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry says that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Just days after our interview, Israeli air strikes bombarded Lebanon, killing hundreds as Israel opened up a new front in the war against Hezbollah. The fighting continues as the first anniversary of October 7 passes.
The doc had its first showing a few weeks back at a private screening in Tel Aviv and Moreh said it was moving to see the labor of love on the big screen. Buyers will be given a first peek at Mipcom as the one-year anniversary of October 7 passes. Moreh and Shinar are hoping that having a record of the atrocity’s impact on everyday civilians could make some semblance of a difference in the years to come.
