Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, review: impossible to watch, impossible to look away

Footage captured by Hamas and by survivors from the Nova music festival forms the backbone of this distressing, vital documentary

5/5
Who records their own death? When Jews were last killed so profusely in a single day, there were no smartphones in the cattle trucks, gas chambers or mass grave pits. A year ago in southern Israel, 3,500 festival-goers trippily videoing their own hedonism carried on filming even after the shower of fireworks in the dawn sky were gradually understood to be rockets presaging the motorised arrival of Hamas’s armed slayers. 
Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again (BBC Two), which is an all but unwatchable onslaught, is pieced together from footage recorded by killers and their prey. Both captured the day’s events for posterity, though for different motives.
“It’ll be 20 million years before they understand what happened!” hollers a Jihadist into his chest-cam mic as he zooms in from Gaza by motorbike. It hasn’t taken that long, mainly thanks to the footage caught by defenceless young Israelis as they ran for their lives and hid in dumpsters or fridges. 
“It’s like seeing a horror movie with your own eyes,” remembers one survivor. Except that they’re the ones filming the horror. Another remembers having the presence of mind to capture evidence for future use, and even keeps filming as he consoles two cowering women. 
“I’m filming so that I believe it myself,” says one teenage boy. “I have to film to look at it later, if there is a later.” The most chilling clip – which is saying something – was caught by a student who hid in a bunker crammed with nearly naked corpses, all murdered by Kalashnikov. The image is over in a blink, but that split-second collapses the distance between the Nova Festival and Auschwitz. 
This blistering documentary is the work of Yariv Mozer, who also made last year’s exceptional The Lost Eichmann Tapes. Although a caption acknowledges its catastrophic human cost, the bloody aftermath of October 7 is not his subject. Nor are the staggering security failures. His subject is terror: raw, pure, uncut, 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. 
The film climaxes with IDF footage of the festival soundstage, a massacre of the innocents among Coca-Cola-branded fridges. “You don’t want to see this,” cries a survivor as they are driven away from the charnel house. Maybe not. But anyone whose sympathies draw them to Storyville’s forthcoming sister film, Life and Death in Gaza, about life under bombardment in Gaza must see this too. And, it should go without saying, vice versa. 
Now available on BBC iPlayer and will air on BBC Two at 9pm on Thursday 26 September
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