Stream It Or Skip It: ‘We Will Dance Again’ on Paramount+, a doc about the Oct. 7 attack on a rave in Israel as the war began  (2024)

In writer-director Yariv Mozer’s documentary film We Will Dance Again, now streaming on Paramount+, victims and witnesses offer their firsthand accounts of the Hamas attack at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” an introductory disclaimer acknowledges. “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.” Instead, it offers a reconstruction of the attack from the perspectives of those who were there, through footage on their phones and in later interviews. “I just thought, ‘I have to film,’ festivalgoer Natanel Haziz says in We Will Dance Again. “To look at it later, if there is a later…”

WE WILL DANCE AGAIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: At 6am on Oct. 7, as the sun rose over the Nova/Universo Parelello trance music festival, over 3,000 attendees were gathering at DJ stages or chilling in the event’s adjacent camping area. With the site just three miles inland from the Gaza Strip, many attendees, mostly Israelis in their 20s, were aware of the proximity. “I’m used to missiles,” Yarin Amar says in an interview in We Will Dance Again. “I live near the border.” But when a large barrage of rockets first appeared over the festival, the crowd mostly thought they were fireworks. The documentary captures the growing panic as the music stopped and calls of “Tzeva Adom” – code red – rang out. And as people began to disperse, there was little knowledge about where to go. “Everyone was trying to call some authorities,” another attendee remembers. “But no one was really answering.”

We Will Dance Again shows how the chaos continued to unfold via footage compiled from numerous festivalgoers’ phones. People running for their cars, only to be caught in traffic bottlenecks; trying to locate their friends and partners in the camping zone or bar area; and discovering that the psychedelic drugs they’d taken didn’t mix with the stark reality of sudden encroaching violence. But We Will Dance also has access to the bodycams of Hamas militants, who mounted motorbikes and rode through the breaches in Israel’s fence barrier, straight into the festival area. As the armed incursion met with those fleeing Nova, people were shot to death in their vehicles or cut down in the surrounding fields.

“We heard the first sound of a grenade being thrown into a shelter.” Present-day interviews with concertgoers like Amar, Eitan Halley, Halely Ben-Tzion, and Noam Ben-David provide a gripping account of the attack from multiple perspectives, as the attacks and violence spread and they hid in concrete protection units or makeshift shelters like dumpsters and portable refrigerators. And with the police and Israeli military unable to effectively respond for over six hours, through footage from the day and social media feeds, we also learn of their friends and loved ones who didn’t make it, or who were taken hostage. Of the festivalgoers at Nova, over 350 were killed in the attack, with 44 abducted by Hamas. “The first sunrise I saw was beautiful,” Elad Hakim says of his experience at the music festival-turned-massacre. “The second sunrise I saw was horrible.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Paramount+ also features the doc Superpower, where co-director Sean Penn found himself in the middle of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. And from an American perspective, the assembled footage in We Will Dance Again, taken as the attack was occuring, suggests some of the more harrowing documentary material that has been produced about 9/11.

Performance Worth Watching: Recounted in the doc are many experiences where festival attendees went from partying with their friends to fleeing for their lives in the space of a few minutes. “He’s running faster than me,” Yuval Siman-Tov says of his close friend Tamir Leshetz. “I feel the bullets everywhere. I’m ready to sacrifice myself for him. I’ll fall to the ground, pretend I’m dead…”

Memorable Dialogue: Particularly powerful in We Will Dance Again are Eitan Halley’s memories of being in a shelter with a young man named Aner Shapira while it was under attack by militants with explosive devices. Shapira, 22, was eventually killed. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘This kid is throwing back live grenades.’ I think there’s a chance that he’s not the only one that’s going to have to do this. I get myself ready for the point where if something happens to him, that I’m going to have to pick up what he left.”

Sex and Skin: The documentary includes graphic footage of individuals who were killed or wounded in the attack.

Our Take: Without any cuts to quotes or analysis from military, police, or Israeli government officials, We Will Dance rests its narrative entirely on the experiences of the Nova ravegoers interviewed, as well as the people we can’t hear from, who appear in the footage or in posthumous still images. Writer and director Yariv Mozer gives all of this often chaotic footage a cohesive feel, which helps us understand the scope of the attack. But it’s the editing in We Will Dance Again, by Yasmine Novak and Roy Balbirsky, that’s really impressive. A crazed patchwork of footage from mobile devices, filmed on the fly and in a life-or-death panic, becomes a mechanism to deliver the pathos, heartbreak, and feelings of desperate empathy toward their fellow citizens that fueled peoples’ experiences during the over six-hour attack.

The Israel-Hamas war has grown worse and all-consuming since Oct. 7. And We Will Dance Again is consciously being released to streaming on the anniversary of the attack. That it will be viewed through the lens of politics and personal belief seems obvious. But We Will Dance makes things truly personal with its focus on individuals – living and dead – who experienced the massacre firsthand. Of those who can, some might indeed dance again. But as with the aftermath of any tragedy, they’ll have to process what they witnessed first. This documentary gives all viewers the opportunity to consider not only the gravity of the Israeli-Gaza conflict and the experiences of those interviewed, but a sense of what happened through the immediacy of a phone set to record.

Our Call: Stream It. With access to the phones and social media platforms of regular people on the ground, We Will Dance Again offers an impressively personal point of view on the Israeli-Hamas war, built around the shattering collective experience of attending a joyous music festival that was transformed into a kill zone.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.