Barbara Wurm: I understand you just finished post-production?
Anat Even: I edited the film in Israel with my editor, Oron Adar, we have been working together for over 25 years. When we locked the edit, I went to Paris for sound design and color grading. There was a lot to do, especially since I shot mostly on an iPhone. The material needed very careful work.
BW: When did you decide to start filming?
AE: I am not sure I ever ‘decided’. Right after October 7, I went to Kibbutz Nir Oz, as soon as the roads opened. I had to see what happened. Nir Oz was my home for many years. Close friends were killed or kidnapped. The houses were burned, the whole area turned into a military zone. At first, I had no intention of making a film. I was in shock, full of rage and grief. But after a few days I felt I had to go back to the Negev. It was almost physical, like an impulse. I took my camera, my iPhone, a tripod, and went alone. I needed time for observation, and I needed to be by myself, thinking: maybe time will make things clearer. I started by filming steady shots of the destroyed houses. I thought I was just creating an archive for the kibbutz. Then I began driving around the fields near the border. Everywhere there were tanks, army bases, barricades. Agricultural land, land full of life that feeds the country, had become a dead, emptied space. While filming, images from cinema and literature were running through my mind. All this culture built around the human being, love, desire, war, destruction. And I kept asking myself, how can people be so cruel to each other? I had no plan, no words yet. Just my observation.
BW: We hope the film speaks for you, to some extent.
AE: I hope so. The words came much later, in the editing room with Oron Adar. For a long time, I only had images. Then we had to decide: how much do we say? How much context is necessary? How do we avoid simplifying something so complex? Narration is always a dilemma. We were searching for the right words until the very last days, still confused, still mourning.
BW: Did you ever feel you had understood?
AE: Some events take years to process. What happened in the Negev and what is happening in Gaza is beyond understanding. I don’t know how we move forward from this breaking point.
BW: Who is ‘we’?
AE: Israeli society. But mainly, my friends and colleagues in human rights organizations. We’ve been demonstrating from the beginning, against the war, against the destruction of Gaza, against the starvation. Unfortunately, we’re a minority, and the situation keeps deteriorating. Something changed deeply in the Israeli society after October 7. It’s hard even to imagine a political horizon now.
BW: Because of your connection to Nir Oz – last year we had the documentary HOLDING LIAT, have you heard of it?
AE: I know Liat and her husband Aviv since he was a child. I haven’t seen the film yet, but of course I heard about it.
This is the first time in my life that I started a film with no plan, just with an impulse to look at a place and try to understand what I was seeing.
Fabian Tietke: At what point did you realize you were actually making a film?
AE: If I didn’t have such a deep connection to Nir Oz, I wouldn’t have gone back there again and again. I wasn’t controlling the situation – the situation was controlling me. I was angry, confused. I kept asking: how is it possible that we cannot stop this national orgy of death? But after some days of filming, I realized the material was becoming a metaphor for this absurd, contradictory reality Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in. It pushed me to continue. I felt I didn’t have enough distance, that I needed help. I called my friend Ariel, who lives in Paris. I asked him to accompany me in this journey, for maybe together we will find the way. I sent him the rushes regularly, and we spoke nearly every evening. For months we talked, about structure, about language, about what kind of film this could be. Those conversations really saved me. The film developed while I was filming it. All my previous films began with long research, a question or a certain idea. Here there was only impulse. October 7 turned everything upside down.
FT: How did you begin shaping it?
AE: I understood that the film had to start in Nir Oz and continue toward Gaza, toward what we hear constantly, day and night, the bombing across the border. The word ‘annihilation’ was everywhere, in political speeches, in the media, in the streets. Most people wanted revenge. I felt I had to resist this language. I have been making films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Nakba for over 25 years. But this felt unprecedented. I felt that I had to speak about the unthinkable state of our existence, about the suffering and loss this endless conflict produces.
BW: What was the last film you made before this?
AE: In 2017, I made DISAPPEARANCES about Manshiya, a neighborhood on the beach between Tel Aviv and Jaffa that was erased after 1948. Palestinians were expelled, then Jewish immigrants lived there temporarily, and later they too were displaced. Eventually the entire neighborhood was wiped out and replaced by a park and business center. That film was the last one of a trilogy about Israeli-Palestinian places, about how our history is buried in the landscape.
FT: Where do you live now?
AE: I moved to Jaffa a few years ago, after living near Manshiya for almost thirty years. I had started developing a film about Jaffa as a new citizen, but when the war began, I stopped everything and began this film instead.
BW: When did you know the film had an ending?
AE: In this film it was the deadline. When you told us the film was selected, we were still editing and I kept filming until late November. Actually, nothing has changed, even if there is a ceasefire, so I could continue forever, but the deadline put an end to it.
I realized I could only use my own material, my own point of view. The voices from Gaza will tell their own story.
FT: How did you approach that decision formally?
AE: The main cinematic question was: how do we observe? What does it mean to watch from this point of view, from this distance? At some point, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1956) came back to me as a reference, the question of what it means to be a witness. How do we perceive what we see? What responsibility comes with our gaze, and how do we act on it? I can only speak from my position, use only my own material, my own point of view to express how the war influences people’s life, their suffering and pain and the trauma they will carry throughout their entire lives. About six months into the war, I began reading texts by writers and poets from Gaza. The language, the pain, the dignity – it was overwhelming. I decided their words should be part of the film, that their voices must resonance in the world.
BW: Is that how you connected with Ezzideen Shehab?
AE: I don’t know Ezzideen personally. He studied abroad for ten years and he had returned to visit his family in Gaza five days before the war. Through a German professor in Jerusalem, I contacted him and asked if he would allow me to use his texts. He agreed without hesitation. Now we are trying to help him leave Gaza. I hope we will see him soon, outside Gaza.
FT: How did the scene of Netanyahu visiting the kibbutz happen?
AE: By chance. I was there and suddenly we heard he was coming. The message circulating said, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ They didn’t want demonstrators. He slipped in quietly, afraid of the demonstrators who were following him everywhere. I filmed it. Stylistically the scene is different, almost as if it were from another film, but we couldn't leave it out.
BW: Can you say something about Avichai?
AE: Avichai works with Breaking the Silence and researches military armament. Since the beginning of the war, he has analyzed the weapons used in Gaza. He helped me understand, very precisely, what we are doing there.
BW: Your conversation with Ariel in the film stops at a certain point.
AE: We are close friends, but we fought a lot, about form, about emphasis, about responsibility and belonging. It was really tense. Editing in the second year of the war was quite complicated. Ariel had clarity from afar. I was immersed in the material. When you actually touch the images every day, it’s different, I needed more time to understand what kind of film I’m making. At some point Ariel said: nothing matters except Gaza. In the end, that struggle became part of the film’s structure. The uncertainty, the disagreement, the searching, that is the film.
