‘We Will Dance Again’ director: Terrified Nova partygoers recorded their efforts to survive

Within hours of the unfolding massacre that took place at the Supernova desert rave on October 7, documentary filmmaker Yariv Mozer knew he would chronicle the painful, tragic disaster.

The harrowing 90-minute film, “We Will Dance Again,” produced with Hot 8 and Paramount Plus, is now being screened worldwide and at private showings in Israel.

It reveals the hours of utter fear and rampant bloodshed as thousands of partygoers attempted to flee hundreds of Hamas terrorists who invaded the party in the early morning hours of October 7, hemming them in on the highway, gunning them down at the party site, as they attempted to run through the nearby fields, and as they hid from the rocket fire in shelters.

As he watched the gruesome attack unravel, Mozer knew he wanted to do something. A documentary filmmaker, he wanted to be as close as possible to the south and what took place there.

“The party wasn’t political and we knew this film could cross borders and be easier to bring to the world,” said Mozer. “The partiers weren’t in the army, they came to party, and they found themselves in a scene of terror.”

By the afternoon of October 7, Mozer was mining every army connection he had to get permission to enter the closed military zone at the Supernova.

“I texted [IDF spokesperson Daniel] Hagari on the first day,” said Mozer, who has worked closely with the IDF Spokespersons unit on other films. “I spoke to him on October 7 and two days later I bothered him again and then he let me come down south.”

Two days later, Mozer was at the Nova site with another reporter from a major international newspaper, who said they were witnessing the site of a massacre.

“It was very, very fresh. Bags of bullets next to lollipops on sticks,” said Mozer of the trance rave site attended by thousands as a festival of love, peace and freedom.

Mozer is no stranger to difficult material. A Tel Aviv University film school graduate, he’s directed and produced dozens of films, including an award-winning film about David Ben-Gurion, and another about former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, and teaches at multiple film schools.

This film takes viewers on a chronological path through the horrific hours of October 7 at the Supernova site, with maps that show the proximity of the party site to the Gaza Strip and the surrounding kibbutz communities that were also viciously attacked, with hundreds killed and taken hostage.

Out of the 3,500 partygoers who attended the Nova music festival, 364 were murdered, and 44 others 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.

Mozer and his team gathered real-life video footage from survivors and victims who kept their phones on throughout, whispering goodbye messages to loved ones, showing their nightmarish efforts to survive the onslaught. Those harrowing videos, along with visceral footage found from Hamas terrorists, form a significant bulk of the film.

The gripping recordings take viewers through the early morning hours of the party as it really began to get going, and then as hundreds of rockets streaked across the sky, along with a growing realization by the partygoers that terrorists were attacking in person, and their desperate attempts to escape and hopefully survive.

That footage is interspersed by intensive interviews with several survivors, each gripping account representing a different angle of who was at this party and the disaster that took place.

Mozer worked with a staff of researchers who pored over tens of survivors’ stories, building a database of the participants and the different types of stories, whether they’d lost someone, had someone taken hostage, and the kinds of visuals in their possession.

“It’s like a process of casting,” said Mozer. “I had to figure out who are my characters and how they look at the camera.”

Mozer said he was working with mostly young people, “beautiful kids, because that’s the age at the party,” looking for those who were also charismatic and could more easily identify with viewers to humanize the story being told.

He wanted each survivor in the film to bring a different angle of the overall rave, including those who organized the party and worked at the event, those who were trying drugs for the first time, others who came from religiously observant families and whose parents didn’t even know they were there.

It was a process that included in-depth interviews with the survivors, initially discovered by Mozer as he began looking for videos on TikTok on October 7, where many Nova partiers began posting footage, even in those first hours of the attack.

“They were in a situation where no one was answering them, no one was helping them,” said Mozer. “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.'”

The painstaking research process eventually included watching translated Hamas footage, where the joy and excitement of the terrorists became clear as they headed out to kill and massacre Israelis.

His team watched the Hamas footage in the pursuit of more background material, said Mozer — who obtained the videos through unofficial channels — and in the hopes that maybe they would understand the truth of what the terrorists did.

“It’s hard to connect to it,” he said. “I tried to explain it, to understand it, and it was the worst part of making the film.”

He also spent hours interviewing each survivor and had a psychologist on set with him who sat with each survivor directly after filming. He did the same again after bringing the interviewed survivors to the editing room and a preview screening.

Now some of those survivors appearing in the film accompany Mozer to screenings around the world, participating in the question-and-answer periods that follow each viewing.

Most of the screenings have been for Israeli and Jewish audiences, said Mozer, with one at New Zealand’s Doc Edge festival and another in England where audience members asked more difficult questions.

“They asked in New Zealand if I supported the war in Gaza, and I understood where that question came from,” said Mozer, who served reserve duty this past year in his role as filmmaker.

In England, a journalist asked if Mozer thought there were similarities between Israelis dancing near the border of Gaza and the family of Nazi commander Rudolf Hess living next to a concentration camp, as portrayed in the current film “The Zone of Interest.”

“I’m the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and that comparison is crazy in my mind,” said Mozer. “It lacks a full understanding, but that’s where we are in the world, and how some British look at us.”

Over the next weeks, as Israel marks one year since October 7, Mozer and the survivors appearing in the film will accompany screenings at communities throughout the country, including many screenings for IDF units and bases.

“That surprised me because the IDF doesn’t look good in the film,” said Mozer. “But it’s impressive that they’re willing to stand behind it.”

It’s also been helpful to have Paramount Plus behind the film, pushing it to other countries and channels as well as streaming it for free.

For Mozer, that’s been the focus of making this film, creating a documentary that will always exist, showing what happened on October 7 at the Supernova desert rave, aiming to ensure that no one ever forgets.