06:30, on ChaiFlicks

The crimes against humanity committed by Hamas on October 7th were unusually well documented. The killers themselves live-streamed their atrocities and murders. There is no excuse for ignorance. If you haven’t watched their footage due to your delicate nature, that is, in a way, an acknowledgement of their cruelty. However, in some ways, this documentary makes it easier for the audience to confront the horrors of 10/7. Instead of taking viewers to scenes of Hamas’s carnage, it uses miniature models, much like those Rithy Panh employed to tell his family’s story during the Cambodian genocide in The Missing Picture. Nevertheless, the savagery of the attacks remains inescapable in Alon Daniel’s 06:30, which premieres today on ChaiFlicks.

The survivors Daniel assembled were just ordinary people. They were married couples, teenagers, and music fans enjoying the Nova Festival. Many were also kibbutzniks, who among Israelis are considered most likely to support a peaceful two state solution. Many endured serious injuries and in some cases avoided death through sheer luck. In numerous cases, they survived thanks to the sacrifices of loved one.

Ironically, subsequent to the production of 06:30, it has been revealed that a teenage hostage’s story was even more perilous than the film suggests. That is saying a lot, considering the young man fully explains how he was shot in the stomach and nearly starved during his captivity. However, Ynet News later revealed that his father was a Muslim Arab Kibbutz member, which might have been considered treasonous by his son’s Hamas abductors, so his parents kept his father’s identity secret during the hostage-release negotiations.

Of Dogs and Men, on ChaiFlicks

Sixteen-year-old Dar does the worst kind of doom scrolling. She constantly streams the atrocity videos posted by Hamas mass-murderers, searching for evidence regarding her abducted mother’s fate. She is powerless to help her mother, but tries her best to find the family’s missing pet dog Shula in Dani Rosenberg’s Of Dogs and Men, which premieres tomorrow on ChaiFlicks.

Rosenberg’s film has been described as a dramatic-documentary hybrid. However it is labeled, it is viscerally realistic. Rosenberg filmed scenes on and around the Nir Oz kibbutz, so the destruction viewers see was indeed wrought by the terror attacks. Nevertheless, Rosenberg established a firm rule against using homes where real murders or abductions were perpetrated. He also cast several actual survivors in roles that very much reflect their own harrowing experiences. The premise was “scripted,” but much of dialogue was improvised. Some conversations even mention names that might sound familiar to viewers, especially if they watched Montana Tucker’s The Children of October 7.

Tragically, we will never see Dar’s mother, but we hear her disembodied voice, as the young teen reads passages from the abducted woman’s journal, which she recovered from the rubble of her home. Like many Israeli parents, her mother sacrificed herself to protect Dar. Not surprisingly Dar now wrestles with guilt, desperation, and potential grief as a result.

Throughout Of Dogs and Men, Rosenberg refuses to engage in propaganda. Instead, he wrestles with Israel’s soul-searing national tragedy, while also offering compassion for Gazans as well, whether they reciprocate it or not. In fact, in a sort of “best case” fantasy, Dar imagines a Gazan boy adopting Shula, who was last seen chasing the terrorists who kidnapped her mother.

Ironically, young Ori Avinoam is the only professional in the cast, but she is so convincing as traumatized Dar, it is both profoundly impressive and deeply troubling. Clearly, she can place herself in Dar’s position, which is a heavy burden for a teen her age.

Nora Lifshitz, a real-life pet rescuer who would not look out of place in New York’s Alphabet City, also dramatically contradicts the convenient stereotypes of Israelis. She is a hipster with razor-sharp attitude and a giant heart.

Joann Sfar’s To Life

It was hard for Jewish Americans see how the world turned its back on their pain and suffering in the days following the 10/7 terrorist murders and sexual assaults. It was probably even worse for their French counterparts. At least most mainstream American political leaders expressed their outrage, including Biden. In contrast, Macron fell mute and disappeared for a week, while voices of hate immediately started protesting the victims. It was particularly painful for French leftwing Jewish intellectuals like cartoonist-filmmaker Joann Sfar. In the days that followed, he tried to make sense of the world’s twisted reaction in his notebooks, which have been polished into To Life, which just released in stores.

To Life has enough structure to pass for a graphic novel, but the term notebook warns readers to expect a looser flow. Even before 10/7, French Jews were increasingly reluctant to display the Star of David (and Macron said nothing). Yet, Sfar was rather defiantly inclined to start wearing the Chai, because of its meaning: “to life.”

As the news of Hamas’s mass murder and weaponized rape trickled out, Sfar desperately sought news of his cousins in Israel. Although he briefly lived in Israel with his parents, they quickly repatriated back to France, so he always considered himself French—and rather left-of-center. Nevertheless, the surge in anti-Semitic violence (predating but accelerated by 10/7) and the Charlie Hebdo assassinations already started challenging his world view.

Eventually, Sfar visits Israel, to check-in on family and collaborate with the crew producing a TV series based on his Klezmer graphic novels. The great irony of To Life is that Sfar feels like a liberal Jewish Frenchman in Israel, where engages with Arab Israelis and Jewish Israels who are keenly critical of West Bank Settlers, Netanyahu, and the ultra-Orthodox. Yet, in France, he feels increasingly like an outsider.

Holding Liat

One of the great ironies of the 10/7 Hamas atrocities was the fact that many of the murdered and abducted Israelis advocated liberal positions of peace and reconciliation with respect to Palestinians. Such was definitely the case for the Atzili family. Aviv and Liat were kidnapped and held captive in Gaza, leaving behind their grown children and elderly parents. Yet, Liat Atzili’s father Yehuda Beinin was no shrinking violet. He dutifully sat for media interviews to raise awareness for his daughter and son-in-law, but he also freely offered his opinions on Netanyahu, whether or not people wanted to hear them—and they usually didn’t. Beinin’s distant cousin (by marriage) Brandon Kramer documented the family during their long, painful crisis in Holding Liat, which opens Friday in theaters.

Beinin, his wife Chaya, and their daughter are American citizens, but they have lived in Israel for many years. They are also definitely leftwing, Netanyahu-despising Kibbutzniks, but that made no difference when Hamas abducted Liat and Aviv. Initially, their U.S. citizenship is presumed to be an advantage, but that starts to look questionable as her captivity drags on and on.

Likewise, Beinin’s strong personality clearly often cut both ways. Yet, his brother, a further-left professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history is even more pronounced in his sympathies for the Palestinian cause. Frankly, many families of hostages would be uncomfortable with either brother speaking on their behalf. However, Yehuda Beinin seems to understand this, at least to an extent.

Obviously, viewers immediately sympathize and identify with the Atzili and Beinin family. What they endure is horrible to even imagine. That said, Kramer missed the opportunity to probe Beinin (or his brother) on any of their forcefully expressed opinions—in a genuinely curious, nonconfrontational way. In fact, they might have had interesting answers for questions like “how do you work towards peace with people who’d rather continue killing” and “just who could be Israel’s partner for peace in Gaza?”