While most Israelis were reeling with shock following the October 7 Hamas attack in 2023, Dani Rosenberg was already filming a movie about it, Of Dogs and Men, which just opened throughout Israel.
Rosenberg and his small crew, who made this feature film in and around Kibbutz Nir Oz, where a quarter of the members were killed or kidnapped, finished shooting on the first day of the ceasefire in November 2023.
That the movie was made at all is remarkable, and it’s a haunting, poetic drama that truly gives you the feeling of what those who survived the massacre went through in those early days.
It’s a simple story that follows a teenage girl, Dar (Ori Avinoam), whose mother is being held hostage in Gaza. She has left the hotel to which she was evacuated and she returns to Nir Oz to search for her dog. Evading army patrols, she connects with Natan (Natan Bahat, who is actually one of the kibbutz founders), who has already returned, and Nora (Nora Lifshitz), a young woman who is rescuing animals whose owners were forced to abandon them.
Other than Avinoam, the rest of the cast were non-actors whom Rosenberg and his crew encountered in the Gaza Envelope region. Rosenberg recalled that he first learned of the October 7 attack when his plane landed in Korea, where he was bringing his previous film, The Vanishing Soldier, to the Busan International Film Festival.
“I said, ‘OK, when I get back, I’ll start [making a film],’” he said. But when he returned to Israel, “I was completely in shock. I wasn’t thinking about a film at all. All I could do was watch TV or scroll social media, trying to absorb both what had happened and what was still happening.”
He began volunteering on a project that filmed testimonies from survivors and met a young woman in a Dead Sea hotel, both of whose parents had been kidnapped. “Just her strength, the intensity of her presence impressed me… She was the inspiration for the character in my film.”
After getting to know her, “First and foremost, I had an inner motivation to go out and make sense of it all, to understand what happened.” Although he had the inspiration for a character, he didn’t start writing a script right away.
“I told myself: I’m not writing dialogue now, I’m not writing scenes about people who are in trauma right now, at the peak of trauma. So, the decision was that I would travel with the actress who would play the girl to the area, and the people we met would become part of the film, if they wanted to.”
Nir Oz invited Rosenberg to film the movie in the kibbutz
He got in touch with a few of the kibbutzim that were attacked and Nir Oz invited him to make the movie there. At first it was difficult to enter the area, but the residents who had returned to live there or who were going in and out advised Rosenberg and the crew how to get around.
Asked what it was like to be there then he said, “It was a murder scene. It was simply hard, because you go in and the first thing you encounter, even before the sights, are the smells. The smell of death. And of burning.”
But he and the crew kept going because, “There was an understanding that we were documenting something important, something that needed to be documented. You don’t do this lightly.” More than any other film I can think of, documentary or fiction, Of Dogs and Men makes it possible to understand what it was like for the survivors in the aftermath of the massacre.
“I wanted to show what it meant to survive that Saturday, what it meant to keep living. Like, actually: What do you do now? On the news we saw what happened in the toughest moments, but what was it like afterward? What did they do?… I think that was our goal, to talk about October 7 by talking about the days after. The reality afterward.” He credits his producer, Itai Tamir, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, for making sure the movie got made, and for sticking with him as he figured out how to make it work.
“He allowed me to keep searching,” said Rosenberg, and also thanking Noa Regev, the director of the Israel Film Fund, for giving him the freedom to find his way as he filmed. “We filmed chronologically. We would film for a day or two, look at what we had, see what we needed, and we would go back to film some more,” he said.
With Avinoam, he found the perfect actress to embody Dar. “Beyond being a phenomenal actress, she’s also a partner in the film, she co-wrote with me and Itai. It’s our film, and she’s so smart, strong, and courageous.” Avinoam went on to appear in a very different movie, ‘Cuz You’re Ugly, for which she won the Ophir Award for Best Supporting Actress last year. As for the non-actors who appeared in the film, he said that they were lucky.
“The day we arrived, it was the first day that Natan [Bahat] came back to sleep in the kibbutz. He was the first person we met… You can see it, that he’s a real person, not an actor… My basic rule was not to direct them, to let them talk about what they felt comfortable talking about. I just let them lead.” Nora Lifshitz headed for the area on October 8 and really saved hundreds of animals there, he said.
Rosenberg said he drew inspiration for the style of the film from the semi-documentary feel of Italian neorealist cinema and some Iranian films. Asked whether he ever considered making a documentary, given that he used so many real people in the film, Rosenberg said he hadn’t.
“I think the narrative [about the girl looking for her dog], the fictional framework, leads us through the darkness, through the horror, and through the chaos that was there… I feel that precisely because it’s fiction, it makes room for reality. There’s also the plot: She’s looking for the dog. That search itself creates a thread that connects everything.”
It was important to Rosenberg that the movie portrayed the reality on both sides of the border. There are scenes where Dar hears Gaza being bombed, and she is shaken. In another scene, she listens to a reporter talking to a man in Gaza who lost nearly two dozen family members.
She also has a dream that her dog crossed the border and was adopted by a Palestinian boy who hides from bombs, in an animated sequence. When the film was premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2024 and was later shown at other festivals around the world, he found that people with extreme views on both sides were unhappy with it.
“Militantly pro-Palestinian viewers were upset that it didn’t look only at the suffering on the Gazan side. Militantly pro-Israelis were upset that I didn’t only look at Israeli suffering.” Rosenberg said he responded to these critics by saying, “I’m not pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli, I’m pro-human.”
Returning to the Busan film festival this year, Rosenberg was surprised that BDS protesters there called for the film to be boycotted. “But the protest was marginal. The movie was received well there… I tried to get into a dialogue with the BDS supporters, but they wouldn’t see the film, it turned out that because it had an Israeli director, that was enough for them to boycott it.”
Looking back on the film’s long, strange journey, he said that when they finished filming on the eve of the first ceasefire, they thought the war was about to end. “We didn’t imagine it would go on for two more years.” He was adamant that the movie should not be released in Israeli theaters while the war was going on.
“I’m glad we waited,” he said, although he added that this was a problematic time for the Israeli film industry, and that like many filmmakers, he was concerned about proposed governmental reforms that will limit artistic freedom. “I’m concerned that people think it’s OK what [Culture Minister] Miki Zohar is doing, trying to silence people’s voices, to make it harder to make films that don’t align with the government narrative.”
He was particularly happy when the film was shown at the Haifa International Film Festival, because many people who took part in it and other survivors were in attendance. “That was the most emotional screening, those people got to see their stories on screen,” he said. “I was so glad they liked it.”