\n\tNoa Cohen spent months making a movie reconstructing October 7, but none of it can compare to the film she still sees in her head.<\/p>\n
Cohen was far (relatively) from the Gaza<\/a> border when the Hamas attacks on communities in Southern Israel<\/a> began three years ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in my apartment in Tel Aviv with my partner and our dog. The news started \u2014 I think my mother messaged me to turn on the TV \u2014 and suddenly we couldn\u2019t believe what we watching,\u201d she recalls.<\/p>\n But it only became real a little while later, when news reports began the grim business of putting names up on the screen.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019d start seeing victims and you\u2019d think \u2018I went to school with that person.\u2019 Or, \u2019they\u2019re a friend of my friend,\u2019\u201d she says, unable to hold back a tear. \u201cDeath was all around, with so many people you know.\u201d<\/p>\n Cohen is sitting in a hotel restaurant at the Toronto Film Festival in mid-September, having just premiered the Israeli movie Our Loves, one of the first film dramas about the traumatic day.<\/p>\n The process has been a kind of therapy for her \u2014 and, she hopes, Israelis writ large.<\/p>\n Written and directed by the OG Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher, Loves tells an intimate-but sprawling account of that day as seen through a host of interconnected and ethnically diverse Israelis who lived it \u2014 a pair of police officers forced to the front lines in the absence of the army; a young religious woman and a secular young man odd-coupling on the run through the fields near the Nova festival amid bodies and terrorists; a former army tough guy named Shabi who takes matters into his own hands with a band of eager teenage novices; and Cohen\u2019s character Liri, a young woman who ends up in a Southern Israel kibbutz saferoom with her boyfriend\u2019s mother as Hamas gunmen surround them and eventually set the house on fire to flush them out.<\/p>\n Against the backdrop of a gruesome day, the Hebrew-language movie unfolds individual emotions and lives both before and during the attack, everyday problems of course not stopping with the tragedy, just interacting with it.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen something that tragic happens, the human stories \u2014 the individual people and what they\u2019re going through \u2014 gets lost,\u201d Cohen says. \u201cThat\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to honor in the film.\u201d (Nesher says he had a similar goal for the movie: \u201cWe wanted to make it not just a dark blot, we want to remember their individuality, we wanted the world to know each of these people was special,\u201d he told the audience onstage at the TIFF<\/a> premiere.)<\/p>\n The 24-year-old Cohen, who speaks a nearly accent-free English, splits her time between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. She played a very different character two years ago in Netflix\u2019s Biblical epic Mary (the Virgin Mary.) She found this portrayal of a modern Israeli woman to be a little closer to home, but also painful and difficult, every scene bringing her back to that trauma. \u201cI think it helped and hurt?\u201d she says<\/p>\n Cohen has one of the film\u2019s standout scenes, involving an ambulance, an estranged father and a childhood song \u2014 and her character isn\u2019t even conscious for it. Like several moments late in the film, it offers a hug amid the carnage, with reconciliation happening despite or because of the trauma.<\/p>\n Nesher, who made the 1970 iconic local hit The Band (a kind of Israeli M*A*S*H), used an unorthodox development practice reminiscent of Mike Leigh and other art-meets-life Method hounds. As part of the casting process, for instance, he had actors talk about details from their personal lives; Cohen and Shalom Michaelshvili, who plays her father Shabi, each got in a room and talked about their respective challenging paternal and daughter relationships.<\/p>\n \u201cI was then surprised to get the script and see whole chunks of what we said in there,\u201d Cohen says with a combination disbelieving\/ that-sneaky-devil laugh.<\/p>\n Executive produced by Shari Redstone along with Len and Emily Blavatnik, Our Loves has held a private screening at the WGA in Los Angeles and is seeking broader distribution in the U.S. It will be released in Israel next weekend, notably after the anniversary but just before national elections.<\/p>\n The film has drawn the somewhat odd criticism \u2014 also cited, candidly, in a review<\/a> from his publication \u2014 that the story is told almost exclusively from the point of view of Israelis, a complaint to which Cohen responds thoughtfully. \u201cThe film portrays many different perspectives of the people who went through that day. Portraying that doesn\u2019t need to erase the point-of-view of those who didn\u2019t and have gone through other difficult things,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cThis is just the story we\u2019re telling.\u201d<\/p>\n