Nancy Spielberg at Chabad's Children of Chernobyl Children at Heart, in New York, in 2010 City (Photo:Getty)Getty Images
David, along with his children, wife Sharon and younger brother Ariel, were among the 76 hostages kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7. Sharon and the children were released during the first ceasefire in November 2023, but David and Ariel were – for the duration of the film’s production and, up until a week before the JC spoke to Spielberg – still somewhere in Gaza. But we’ll get back to that.
Spielberg – the youngest sister of that other famous Spielberg – was in Israel on October 7 and, like every Jewish filmmaker, wanted to find a way to document the atrocities. She has long made Jewish stories central to her filmography, from consulting on her brother Steven Spielberg’s film The Fabelmans to producing the 2014 documentary Above and Beyond, about American World War II pilots who helped fight Israel’s war of independence. So, when she was introduced to Shoval by family friend and fellow filmmaker Jake Paltrow – yes, the brother of that other famous Paltrow – she was instantly taken with his idea for a film about the twin brothers from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and with Shoval himself.
"We immediately cleaved to each other,” Spielberg said. “I told Tom, ‘You remind me of my brother, because you're very sensitive.’ He was not going to be a voyeuristic filmmaker, shoving his camera into the faces of Sylvia and Louis Cunio, the parents, or Eitan, the twin who was suffering maybe more than any other sibling, because half of his heart and soul had been torn away from him.”
The film, which includes interviews with members of the Cunio family, intentionally omits footage taken during the Hamas attack and refrains from commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing instead on the humanity of this singular, tightly knit family and their once-idyllic life on Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Part of what makes their idyll so vivid in A Letter to David is the raw footage taken by David himself, using a camera Shoval provided during the filming of Youth. With it, David shows viewers around the community he’s lived in since birth, introducing his dog, driving around the complex, and even saying hello to a teenage Shiri Bibas, whom the twins had grown up with “from the time they were in diapers”, Spielberg said.
Shiri was also kidnapped on October 7, along with her husband Yarden and their sons Ariel and Kfir. While Yarden was released earlier this year, Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were killed in Gaza, their bodies repatriated in February. Theirs is a prime example of the human-focused Jewish stories Spielberg is keen for international audiences to see.
"Ariel and Kfir were the poster children of the hostage situation, and people don't even recognise their names outside of Israel,” she said. “So I was like: I have a job, and my job is to change that, because this film needs to travel outside of Israel's borders so other countries get a deeper understanding of what happened to the average Joes, the farmers, the kibbutzniks and the innocents."
With the film approaching its premiere at the UK Jewish Film Festival (UKJFF) this weekend, Spielberg reflected on how circumstances have changed since the crew completed its production; they began when David, his younger brother Ariel and dozens of other hostages were still captive in Gaza, and they’re releasing the film into a world where many – including, crucially, David and Ariel – have now been set free.
“It's so very odd to make a film when you don't know what the ending is,” Spielberg said. “Even when you make a documentary, you still have an outline, you know what you're doing. But this was so open-ended. Every day we wondered if something was going to change.”
According to Spielberg, Shoval never once doubted that David would eventually return, and he maintained that, once David came home, they would revise the ending of the film. They would give it the right ending: a happy one. Now that David is back, Spielberg said they finally will, but only once he’s ready.
Perhaps that revision will also mark the end of the brothers’ cinematic saga with Shoval, which aptly began with a film titled Youth. But more importantly, it will mark the end of a nightmarish chapter in the Cunios’ lives, a period that tore two magnetically connected brothers apart. As Spielberg said, “This letter to David will finally be delivered to its proper recipient.”
A Letter to David premieres in the UK on 9 November
ukjewishfilm.org/event/a-letter-to-david/
