Staying truthful meant working very closely with survivors and families and ensuring that every story was told with the full cooperation of those who lived it. “We promised them accuracy – no propaganda, just their their truth,” says Bender.
Batsheva Yahalomi, whose family was attacked in their home in kibbutz Nir Oz, is a case in point. In the programme, she walks the team through her bullet-riddled home, where her husband Ohad was shot, pointing out where each moment of horror took place. She shows the viewer where she and her daughters were abducted by terrorists before they escaped, only to watch helplessly as her 12-year-old son, Eitan, was taken away on a motorcycle to Gaza.
“She told us to ‘tell our stories, tell it to the country, tell it to the world,’” said Chefetz. “It gave us moral clarity to tell the stories the way we did.”
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Filming in Israel, including in parts of the Gaza envelope, brought challenges and required meticulous planning.
“We were shooting a fight scene between actors playing terrorists and IDF soldiers,” Bender explains. “The mayor of the town was very concerned someone in a nearby building would see it and think it was real. And in that town, the cemetery is full of people who were murdered. So what we had to do was put loudspeakers every 10 yards announcing, ‘We’re shooting a movie, everything is ok.’ The actors also wore white robes on their way to set so no one could mistake them for real gunmen.”
In another scene, a gunfight in a potato field featuring an anti-terror police officer called Kobi, the real Kobi was on set, watching. “I saw his hands shaking,” Chefetz says. “He told me, ‘For the first time I’m looking at myself from the outside and understanding what I went through.’
Some survivors corrected details while they were on set: “No, we ran this way, the gun was over there.” Other times, they would simply cry. One survivor, Ayoub Sulliman, a Bedouin Israeli who hid his with his baby after his wife was murdered, told Chefetz that the series had not conveyed the horror in sufficient detail. “What I saw was a gate to hell.”
The casting process also required great sensitivity says Chefetz, particularly when it came to children. One scene in the series features a mother and her three children, one of them just a year old. “The older kids understood why we were doing this,” he says, “but when you film a scene with armed terrorists, you need to protect the baby.”
To this end, when the actors playing terrorists were filmed entering a room, the infant was not there, Instead, they held up an iPad streaming the children’s cartoon Cocomelon behind the camera, and filmed the baby from the opposite angle. “Her wide-eyed look is her looking at the cartoon,” he says.
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For Chefetz, there was additional reason to make the series. The son of his young daughter's teacher was murdered at Nova.
“I felt paralysed, but when the survivors [later] told me, ‘We want people like you to tell our stories,’ it gave me strength. I felt gratitude for their trust.”
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