Noa Cohen spent months making a movie reconstructing October 7, but none of it can compare to the film she still sees in her head.
Cohen was far (relatively) from the Gaza border when the Hamas attacks on communities in Southern Israel began three years ago.
“I was in my apartment in Tel Aviv with my partner and our dog. The news started — I think my mother messaged me to turn on the TV — and suddenly we couldn’t believe what we watching,” she recalls.
But it only became real a little while later, when news reports began the grim business of putting names up on the screen.
“You’d start seeing victims and you’d think ‘I went to school with that person.’ Or, ’they’re a friend of my friend,’” she says, unable to hold back a tear. “Death was all around, with so many people you know.”
Cohen is sitting in a hotel restaurant at the Toronto Film Festival in mid-September, having just premiered the Israeli movie Our Loves, one of the first film dramas about the traumatic day.
The process has been a kind of therapy for her — and, she hopes, Israelis writ large.
Written and directed by the OG Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher, Loves tells an intimate-but sprawling account of that day as seen through a host of interconnected and ethnically diverse Israelis who lived it — a pair of police officers forced to the front lines in the absence of the army; a young religious woman and a secular young man odd-coupling on the run through the fields near the Nova festival amid bodies and terrorists; a former army tough guy named Shabi who takes matters into his own hands with a band of eager teenage novices; and Cohen’s character Liri, a young woman who ends up in a Southern Israel kibbutz saferoom with her boyfriend’s mother as Hamas gunmen surround them and eventually set the house on fire to flush them out.
Against the backdrop of a gruesome day, the Hebrew-language movie unfolds individual emotions and lives both before and during the attack, everyday problems of course not stopping with the tragedy, just interacting with it.
“When something that tragic happens, the human stories — the individual people and what they’re going through — gets lost,” Cohen says. “That’s what we’re trying to honor in the film.” (Nesher says he had a similar goal for the movie: “We wanted to make it not just a dark blot, we want to remember their individuality, we wanted the world to know each of these people was special,” he told the audience onstage at the TIFF premiere.)
The 24-year-old Cohen, who speaks a nearly accent-free English, splits her time between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. She played a very different character two years ago in Netflix’s Biblical epic Mary (the Virgin Mary.) She found this portrayal of a modern Israeli woman to be a little closer to home, but also painful and difficult, every scene bringing her back to that trauma. “I think it helped and hurt?” she says
Cohen has one of the film’s standout scenes, involving an ambulance, an estranged father and a childhood song — and her character isn’t even conscious for it. Like several moments late in the film, it offers a hug amid the carnage, with reconciliation happening despite or because of the trauma.
Nesher, who made the 1970 iconic local hit The Band (a kind of Israeli M*A*S*H), used an unorthodox development practice reminiscent of Mike Leigh and other art-meets-life Method hounds. As part of the casting process, for instance, he had actors talk about details from their personal lives; Cohen and Shalom Michaelshvili, who plays her father Shabi, each got in a room and talked about their respective challenging paternal and daughter relationships.
“I was then surprised to get the script and see whole chunks of what we said in there,” Cohen says with a combination disbelieving/ that-sneaky-devil laugh.
Executive produced by Shari Redstone along with Len and Emily Blavatnik, Our Loves has held a private screening at the WGA in Los Angeles and is seeking broader distribution in the U.S. It will be released in Israel next weekend, notably after the anniversary but just before national elections.
The film has drawn the somewhat odd criticism — also cited, candidly, in a review from his publication — that the story is told almost exclusively from the point of view of Israelis, a complaint to which Cohen responds thoughtfully. “The film portrays many different perspectives of the people who went through that day. Portraying that doesn’t need to erase the point-of-view of those who didn’t and have gone through other difficult things,” she says, adding, “This is just the story we’re telling.”
She is even more troubled by the Israeli-film boycott calls from the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone. “Silencing artists because of government policies closes conversation. And don’t we need to keep that open?”
It is a principle, she says, that applies to the movie too. “I mean, you don’t have to agree with a government to hear the stories of its people.”
Cohen says the past year has unfolded a fresh post-traumatic process in her native country. “You couldn’t really grieve until all the hostages were home,” she says, alluding to the 251 people who have now all been returned home, or their bodies have. So really we’re not even at the end of the first year of grieving. And there will be many more years.”
But, she adds, “the movie offers a little hope. We want people to feel that after watching it too.”