2023-10-27 13:55:00
“They believed they could live side by side with the Palestinians. They were against war. Nobody has the right to kidnap a 72-year-old woman. It’s against humanity, it’s against everything people might believe in,” Eyal Nouri says of her aunt. and uncle and what happened to them on October 7th. Nuri is participating in a project by Israeli filmmakers, in which relatives and friends of people who are held hostage by the radical Islamist movement Hamas, recognized as a terrorist organization in the European Union, the United States and Israel, record video messages to relatives and friends whom they miss and for whose fate they They are very worried. This online project can be found on the Internet under the name #BRINGTHEMHOMENOW.
On October 7, militants from the terrorist organization Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack in southern Israel. Hundreds of people were killed and many were injured as a result of the brutal attacks. In addition, more than 200 people – mostly Israelis – were taken hostage and deported to the Gaza Strip. As a result, Israel declared war on Hamas, which has already killed many people on the Palestinian side.
Objective of the project
With #BRINGTHEMHOMENOW, the creators want to draw attention to those who are missing. Friends and relatives talk about them in short videos, accompanying their stories with photos and videos from better times. Information about the project spread quickly. The team is currently preparing 30 new requests from relatives for publication. Ready-made videos for social networks are provided with subtitles in several languages. They can be shared using a hashtag.
Online video project by Israeli filmmakersPhoto: #bringthembacknow volunteers
#BRINGTHEMHOMENOW now has its own website and several social media channels. One of the initiators of the project is 31-year-old Israeli director, screenwriter and producer Eliran Peled, who lives in Tel Aviv. In an interview with DW, he explained why he joined well-known colleagues in Israel and abroad who began working on this project.
Israeli director Eliran Peled helped bring the project #BRINGTHEMHOMENOW to life. Photo: AdiLammPhotography
“Some of us working in the film industry felt that we needed to do something. And we thought about how we could help, especially in a hostage situation,” explains Eliran Peled. He calls the situation a “nightmare” they are still in.
Peled and his colleagues quickly responded and contacted some relatives. Just five days after the events, Ari Folman is the son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, born in Haifa and world famous for his animated films Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Where’s Anne Frank? (2021), as well as American journalist and documentary filmmaker Jasmine Kaini, working in Israel, recorded the first video interviews for the project. A team of volunteers edited them so that they could be distributed online as quickly as possible. A few days after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the project’s own website was ready.
Infants and children held hostage
Ari Folman sums up the concerns of the initiators in an interview with the German daily newspaper FAZ as follows: “There was and is so much anger, demands for revenge. And we wanted to draw the attention of the whole world to the fact that babies, children, the elderly, people with dementia were kidnapped. They have nothing to do with this conflict and must be released.”
Producer Peled emphasizes the same thing in an interview with DW. He also recalls that it was important for them “not to show horror, but to tell people’s stories.” It’s about making the “human situation” clear to everyone around the world – no matter what people think about Israel, these conflicts or politics.
Videos call for remembering the hostages every minute
The videos should help prevent the fate of the hostages from being “relegated to the background,” Yael Reuveni, a German supporter of the project, emphasized in an interview with DW. From the point of view of the Israeli director, the most important thing is “at least from the Israeli side, not to abandon these people, to remember every minute that they exist.”
In one of the videos, Eli David talks about how he misses his brother, who is four years younger than him. The brother was at a music festival in the Negev desert near the Gaza Strip and was allegedly kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. Entire families also became hostages. Lior Katz Natanzon recalls in her video that her mother, partner, sister, brother and two nieces were kidnapped. “I would never have believed that something like this could ever happen.”
Working on a project helps you understand what happened
Now the project team has grown to 140 people. Some study the details of the stories or contact the relatives of the hostages, others monitor the work of the website and accounts on social networks. Everything is on a voluntary basis.
Israeli director Yael Reuveni plays the role of animator. She is promoting the #BRINGTHEMHOMENOW project in Germany, where she lives. In an interview with DW, she explains how this work helps her personally: “It’s a way to not just read the news every five minutes and update it, but to do something ourselves that can be useful and important.”
“Please bring them home”
Many politicians and diplomats, including from Germany, are now trying to achieve the release of the hostages. So far the terrorists have released only four hostages. The release of two Israeli women, aged 83 and 84, this week was for humanitarian reasons, Hamas said.
It’s hard to say to what extent #BRINGTHEMHOMENOW can help bring back kidnapped people. But everyone should be able to hear the message that ends all the relatives’ statements in the videos: “Please bring them home.”
See also:
#Bring #Home