Rome, 10 April 2024 – It will be banned to minors under 18 years of age even if it is a generous testimony to humanity: a film that everyone should see. #Nova, the documentary film on the Hamas terrorist attack on the Israeli rave organized on the borders with the Gaza Strip, just presented to Farnese cinema in Rome by the Roman Jewish community in collaboration with the Jerusalem Foundation, and soon available on the main platforms, it tells the story of the havoc of an extreme dawn. The one in which the most beautiful, secular and transgressive Israeli youth encounter terror and death at the hands of Palestinian peers dominated by completely different feelings. Hate in purity. Hamas killers pierce the borders and shoot without restraint, with no other logic than that of carnage or blackmail: 367 dead, 34 kidnapped. “A film to understand the abyss in which on October 7 humanity has fallen – explains the president of the Roman Jewish Community Viktor Fadlun -. The essence of a anti-Jewish hatred which has never waned, which still creeps under the radar in our societies”. Credit to the director Dan Peer it’s telling the massacre “with realism and modesty”respecting “the dignity” of the victims under siege.
Dozens of videos and vocals recovered from the kids’ smartphones they intertwine a chronological tale in whose narration the images posted online by the attackers also converge, the furious race of motorbikes and pick-ups towards an unexpected objective. Because the attackers are unaware of the rave, they simply find it in front of them. A place not even imagined where you can kill or kidnap at will. Here you are Noa Argamani (the 25-year-old who has become a symbol) while being loaded onto a scooter. Here are the other hostages captured (and not yet returned).
#Nova begins with the voice of a girl who calls her family and says she is covered by other bodies. “Pretend you’re dead”, is the father’s telephone order, which strives to be sweet, to convey affection and hope. Fifty-two minutes of screening condense seven hours of madness, from the first rockets launched at dawn by Hamas, when the enthralling music of the Brazilian DJs of Universo Paralello still rages, to the army’s reconnaissance in the devastated camp, where the bodies lie in baseless hiding places behind drinks fridges or beer kegs, or in cars riddled with Kalashnikovs on the side of the road. In between, there is everything else, that is, the abyss that progressively opens up, a descent into hell that takes place gradually.
The documentary film (made by Yes Studios) shows innocence and terror. The trained optimism of those who look at the first intercepted missiles as “fireworks”; the slow realization that the party is over; the invitations from security to leave the area; the randomness of fate that mows down the first and the last. Hamas militiamen execute both those who leave immediately by car (and he still can’t imagine the depth of the infiltration), and those who remain at the base camp, progressively surrounded (waiting in vain for the army and police, mocked by the raid). On the day that marks the bankruptcy of Israeli security, the amazement and disbelief of the children shines through in invocations and prayers, in desperate calls home such as: “If I die, know that I love you”.
The first undecided people are saved, those who abandon their cars in an improvised cemetery on the edge of the rave and throw themselves into the fields, into the woods, among the shrubs. The most intense videos are shot between earth and brambles. They frame faces and bodies: those who are in panic, those who imitate a match for the TV, those who self-motivate, those who cry, those who break into a desperate race among the clods with the bursts of machine guns as the soundtrack. But pietas does not die: “We can’t go over the bodies”, a boy in a car replies to his companion who asks him to speed up. In at least two thousand survive to the outrage of Hamas: they will be the voices from the abyss for future generations.
