We should stop begging and start demanding hostages release, says film director Ari Folman

Two days after Hamas' attack on Israel, Ari Folman, the director of 'Waltz with Bashir' and 'Where Is Anne Frank,' was already working on the 'Bring Them Home' project - a series of interviews with the families of those who were kidnapped by terrorists on October 7.

Folman told i24NEWS that he seeks "to bring the cry of the families" who "were totally neglected by the government." He said that in the process of shooting the interviews, some of the participants received the news that their loved ones were identified as dead.

"There was a lot of confusion and chaos, especially coming from the Nova music festival. Most of all, I felt that those people [hostages' families] were absolutely deserted, neglected, lonely, aside from their friends and families. They had no clue what’s going on, and that was very tough."

The director explained that the film was made for both the external audience worldwide and for Israelis, especially for the government. "Everyone understood there there will be the ground invasion. For the families, it was crucial to state that the hostages should go first."

Folman stated that it was time to stop begging to free the abductees — and to start to demand their release. "The tone should be changed, especially domestically."

He believes that the world's unbalanced reaction to the humanitarian tragedies in Israel and Gaza can be explained by Israeli authorities' failure to voice the tragedy of October 7 that he called a "Biblical" event when "1400 people were slaughtered within hours."

In this sense, Folman added, he was disappointed but not surprised with the lack of solidarity with Israeli victims of Hamas' crimes in the international artist community, especially its liberal left part. The director believes that it is the responsibility of Israeli authorities to communicate the scale of this tragedy to the world. 

Answering the question of how the collective memory can be established in regard to the October 7 events, Folman said that "it will take a long time to heal. We still don’t get what kind of event we are in. We’re trying to absorb everything, but it’s just all happening too fast."

He pointed out that culture needs time to process the trauma in order "to rewrite the memory again." "I did it in my films, and it’s really hard – when you make a movie about a war that took place 20 years ago it’s one thing, because the story is built out of memory. When you come to an event like now that is so fresh, there are no filters at all."

Folman shared that he had planned to shoot a fiction movie about the events of the Yom Kippur war early in 2024, but after October 7 that no longer seemed possible. "Everything that’s written in that script – how can you compare that to a mother calling a TV station asking the broadcaster to send the army to rescue her son?"

In the end of the interview, the i24NEWS anchor Ellie Hochenberg asked how Folman foresaw art healing the nation, but she had to reformulate the question. "Will we be ok?"

"It will be ok," he answered. "In the last 20 years, I have always felt that in order for things to change here, we need a catastrophe. There’s no way me or anyone else could imagine how far this would go. But there will be a new order here."

"I don't know in what direction we will go, but one thing is for sure – we cannot sustain the life that we have lived here for the past 20-30 years, something is going to change, dramatically."

A possibility of a three-day ceasefire that could allow to free some hostages was reported earlier on Wednesday. The Headquarters of Families for Return of Abducted and Missing Persons has spoken in support of the pause that could return their loved ones.