Yariv Mozer, the director of We Will Dance Again, a documentary film about the Nova festival, said that he had to agree with the BBC to not describe Hamas as a terrorist organization if he wanted it to air, according to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday.
The film, which is set to broadcast on the BBC on Thursday, contains unseen footage of the Hamas massacre at the festival on October 7. It was commissioned by BBC Storyville.
Mozer told The Hollywood Reporter that this was a concession he had to make if he wanted the film to be seen by the British public.
"It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not," Mozer said.
This comes amid claims of anti-Israel bias in the BBC since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, including a scandal caused last week by British Lawyer Trevor Asserson's report that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines for news coverage more than 1,500 times since the beginning of the war.
Mozer added that he had offered the documentary to multiple streaming platforms in the US. However, they were reportedly unwilling to pick it up due to concerns about the political situation.
"The film isn’t political," Mozer stated. "It’s told from the eyes of the survivors and from the eyes of Hamas. There is one truth about what happened."
The documentary will still be shown in Australia, Spain and on Paramount+ in the United States.
Brutal details and footage
Speaking on the content of the film, and the deliberation over using graphic and violent footage, Mozer told the Reporter that he "wanted to keep as much as possible, to be able to show how enormous the scale of this attack was and the brutality of these atrocities against people who couldn’t defend themselves."
"A brutal fundamentalistic movement is obsessively looking to destroy the values of Western society. These were young people at a music festival celebrating life, love, and peace: very naïve and free-spirited. And they faced the most horrific people, who value death."
The documentary is a minute-by-minute reconstruction. It begins with the run-up to the attack, which began at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 7, and depicts the events using testimonies, videos, CCTV, GoPro footage from the Hamas live stream, and phone and dashcam footage.
The footage covers the six-plus hours that people tried to hide or escape from the terrorists.