“We Will Dance Again,” a documentary film about the Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, won an award Thursday night at the 46th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
The 90-minute film, produced by Paramount Plus and Hot 8, took home the award for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary. The harrowing documentary chronicles the massacre chronologically, weaving together video footage from phone cameras and Hamas bodycams with survivor testimony.
Yariv Mozer, who directed the film, accepted the prize while wearing a yellow hostage pin and a yellow tie on stage at the ceremony in New York City.
“As of tonight, [it has been] 620 days that the Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza have experienced a catastrophic pain because of the war triggered by Hamas on October 7,” Mozer said in his acceptance speech. “‘We Will Dance Again’ is a document of history recording events as they happened.”
Mozer noted that the film’s producer, Michal Weits, was wounded this week when an Iranian ballistic missile hit her home in Tel Aviv: “Michal is hospitalized and we wish her a full recovery.”
Also joining Mozer and the producers and editors on stage was Natalia Casarotti, the mother of Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa, who was murdered at age 21 while fleeing the Nova festival, as well as two survivors who appear in the film, Yuval Siman Tov and Tamir Leshetz.
Yariv Mozer, the documentary filmmaker who directed ‘We Will Dance Again’ about the Hamas massacre at the Nova festival on October 7. (Courtesy)
“Above all, we dedicate this award to the safe and immediate return of the hostages who are still in Gaza,” Mozer proclaimed on stage. “We want this cycle of bloodshed to end. This war should end. This war should not serve the interests of the Israeli government and the Hamas terror group.”
The film beat out four other entries in the category, including the PBS documentary “A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians.”
Mozer, a veteran filmmaker, told The Times of Israel in an interview last year that he made the decision to pursue the film just hours after the massacre began, and was allowed to visit the site of the rave just two days later.
He also combed through videos on social media, finding clips posted by survivors and victims who were desperately cataloguing what many believed to be the last moments of their lives.
“They were in a situation where no one was answering them, no one was helping them,” the director said last year. “So they picked up their phones to have a kind of communication with the world, to connect, because they thought, ‘I may not be alive in another minute, and everyone will see and understand that I was in this situation.’”
Of the 3,500 partygoers who attended the Nova music festival, 364 were murdered, and 44 were taken hostage by Hamas terrorists. A total of 251 hostages were taken captive and more than 1,200 people were murdered in the prolonged Hamas attack on October 7 that spread throughout 22 communities in addition to the Nova festival.
Of the 50 hostages remaining in captivity in Gaza, 15 were taken from the site of the festival. Those believed by Israeli authorities to still be alive are Elkana Bohbot, Rom Braslavski, Evyatar David, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, Maxim Herkin, Segev Kalfon, Bar Kuperstein, Eitan Mor, Yosef-Haim Ohana, Alon Ohel and Avinatan Or.
On Wednesday night, the Emmys handed out its prizes for news coverage, awarding several productions related to the ongoing war in Gaza, including a Business Insider feature titled “The Man Who Feeds Gaza’s Children,” a New York Times short form feature, “She Survived an Airstrike that Killed Her Entire Family in Gaza,” and a New York Times opinion piece titled “Two Weeks Inside Gaza’s Ruined Hospitals.”
Jessica Steinberg contributed to this report.
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