{"id":17370,"date":"2025-09-12T05:19:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T05:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/17370\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T05:19:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T05:19:06","slug":"the-road-between-us-the-ultimate-rescue-review-a-snapshot-of-10-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/17370\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue’ Review: A Snapshot of 10\/7"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tUndeniably gripping at times, while proving conclusively that any attempt to do an \u201capolitical\u201d documentary about what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023, is inherently unworkable, Barry Avrich\u2019s over-titled new documentary The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue<\/a> is designed to be controversial. And, based on responses before and after the film\u2019s Toronto premiere<\/a>, it generally succeeds.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019d posit that there are disingenuous filmmaking choices that Avrich makes that will probably limit the doc\u2019s ability to reach a wider audience, but those are the choices he made, which one set of viewers will find inspiring and another will find offensive. This isn\u2019t the film that was going to bridge those gaps anyway.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA gripping story in search of a larger argument.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Docs)
Director: Barry Avrich
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 35 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tAvrich\u2019s goal, at least for the first 80 minutes of the 95-minute documentary, is to keep a tight and unwavering focus on a story that, as he presents it, is like a real-life version of Taken. The implicit hope is that if you retain that laser focus on a terrifying and heroic thing that happened on October 7, 2023, nobody needs to think of anything that came before or after. I highly doubt it will work.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe story is about Amir Tibon and Miri Tibon, who lived in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, near the Gaza Strip. On the morning of October 7, when Hamas terrorists staged a deadly attack on Israel, Amir, Miri and their two daughters took refuge in their house\u2019s safe room. Amir didn\u2019t know the scope of the incursion, but he texted his father, Noam.<\/p>\n

\n\tNoam spent 35 years in the Israeli military, rising to the rank of major general, and he responded to Amir\u2019s text by immediately getting dressed and hitting the road with Amir\u2019s mother Gali. Despite all of his military connections, Noam couldn\u2019t get anybody on the phone and also didn\u2019t know the scope of the attacks. But he would gradually become exposed to the horror on this rescue mission, which began as something single-minded and then grew more expansive in its heroism.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the most part, the documentary takes a minute-by-minute look at that fateful morning, with so much intensity and nightmarish immediacy that there\u2019s very little time or room to ask questions or think about anything beyond the next moment.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmir and Miri share their memories of holing up in a lightless, airless concrete room with two children under the age of 5, trying desperately to remain quiet. Additional perspectives from the kibbutz come from several members of the cooperative\u2019s security team and the wife of its security lead. (The decision to bring the security lead\u2019s 9-year-old daughter on-camera for no purpose, given that she\u2019s obviously still traumatized by that day, was an awful and ethically questionable one.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is all accompanied by the footage that the Hamas fighters were streaming live during the attack. I\u2019ve seen a lot of that footage and this is, honestly, the most restrained and sanitized footage the documentary could have used \u2014 and it\u2019s horrifying.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, Noam and Gali re-enact their road trip, which took on a Homeric quality as they kept getting waylaid by the increasingly evident scale of what was happening that morning. The memories coming back to both Noam and Gali makes for potent storytelling, though Avrich overplays his hand occasionally, as when Noam waves around a gun and hits the ground as he matter-of-factly remembers encountering dead Israeli soldiers and killing any terrorist he came across.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary keeps wanting to treat Noam as just a father and grandfather rescuing his family, a reminder of the Israeli victims of 10\/7 and the hostages still being held in Gaza. At the same time, though, the film has anger it doesn\u2019t quite know what to do with. The documentary joins the frustrated chorus wondering why the Israeli government and military were caught so unprepared by the attack, but because it isn\u2019t trying to be an investigative piece, it has no answers. So the frustration is just haunting and empty. That leads to circular reasoning like Gali\u2019s assessment that the Israeli government and military were embarrassed by the failures of intelligence, which turned their subsequent actions into a war of revenge, which she says was bad for \u2026 Israel. It\u2019s a train of thought that a documentary that can barely be bothered to acknowledge the existence of non-combatant Palestinians probably shouldn\u2019t have tried to pursue at all.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn forcing viewers to remember the complicated world before and after 10\/7, without addressing the war\u2019s bigger questions, The Road Between Us loses its tenuous grasp on a version of this story that isn\u2019t political. It never existed anyway, but the majority of the documentary will keep audiences busy enough to pretend. There\u2019s a story worth telling here, a snapshot within a sprawling tragedy, but Avrich can\u2019t make a bigger statement that doesn\u2019t feel oversimplified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Undeniably gripping at times, while proving conclusively that any attempt to do an \u201capolitical\u201d documentary about what happened…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69,8741,3572,3573,3575,1998,11713],"class_list":["post-17370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-the-road-between-us-the-ultimate-rescue","tag-tiff","tag-tiff-2025","tag-toronto-2025","tag-toronto-film-festival","tag-toronto-international-film-festival-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}