BBC airs Nova massacre film after insisting references to Hamas as terrorists removed

ToI Staff

---

‘We Will Dance Again,’ renowned 90-minute documentary detailing Palestinian terror group’s Oct. 7 onslaught at Israeli music festival, altered to align with contentious BBC policy.

Nova’s EDM music festival in southern Israel, as seen in Yariv Mozer’s documentary film, “We Will Dance Again.” (Courtesy of production)

“We Will Dance Again,” a full-length documentary film about the Hamas massacre of over 360 people at the Supernova music festival during the terror group’s October 7, 2023 assault on southern Israel last year, aired on Britain’s BBC2 on Thursday evening, though only after filmmakers agreed not to refer to Hamas as terrorists.

“It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not,” said Yariv Mozer, who directed the film, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

The UK public broadcaster was broadly criticized in the wake of the cross-border onslaught last year for its refusal to describe Hamas as terrorists, even though the group’s military wing is proscribed by the United Kingdom as such, and even after the widespread documentation of its systematic targeting of civilians that day.

“Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys,” BBC world editor John Simpson said in a column explaining the network’s position a few days after Hamas attacked.

“No one can possibly defend the murder of civilians, especially children and even babies — nor attacks on innocent, peace-loving people who are attending a music festival,” Simpson added.

“We Will Dance Again,” which runs 91 minutes and has also been shown across the world at special screenings and film festivals in recent weeks, delves into festival-goers’ experience during the all-night rave before it was attacked in the morning, and then documents the assault itself and relates the survivors’ efforts to piece together their lives in the aftermath.

We Will Dance Again | Paramount+ Official Trailer

(​​It is available for online users in the United States at Paramount+ and in the UK on the BBC2 website.)

It will also air on Israel’s Hot 8, Germany’s RTL, as well as on networks in Spain and Australia.

Images from Yariv Mozer’s documentary film, “We Will Dance Again.” (Courtesy of production)

The filmmakers worked with more than two dozen survivors of the festival, who told both their own stories and those of friends who were killed.

Related, from our partner: Nova victims receive emotional standing ovation at BBC documentary screening

Hamas-led terrorists killed a total of some 1,200 people that day, mostly civilians butchered at the rave or in their homes, and took 251 hostages, amid extensively documented acts of brutality and sexual assault, starting an ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian terror group.

Speaking at a screening in Los Angeles on Wednesday, producer Susan Zirinsky said there were “arguments” in the production process over how to graphically represent the atrocities, without making the film so difficult that nobody would watch it.

An aerial picture from October 10, 2023, shows the abandoned site of the Supernova music festival, near Kibbutz Re’im, where some 360 people were killed in Hamas’s brutal October 7 onslaught. (Jack Guez/AFP)

“Do we show somebody getting shot? Do we take that gunman going up to the person and then [pull] away, and then go back so that you know that person has been shot?” she recalled, according to The Wrap.

“But it was clear we wanted it to be a commercial film that will address people on mainstream channels,” he said. The filmmakers ultimately decided to blur victims’ faces after they were hit, while still depicting the atrocities committed by Hamas.

Mozer has also made films in recent years about senior Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, gay Palestinians, and then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. In 2017, Mozer won the Israeli Film Academy award for his documentary “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue,” about Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion.

A poster for ‘We Will Dance Again,’ a documentary about the Supernova desert rave, showing October 7, 2023 Supernova victim Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa. (Courtesy: Shax Photography and the production)

Mozer, Zirinsky and others have stressed that the film is apolitical. An opening title of the film notes, “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” adding: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

Nevertheless, similar efforts to tell the story of the attack on the Nova festival have been protested against, including a New York exhibit of personal artifacts from the festival that drew expressions of open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as chants endorsing the attack.

---

---