Director Talya Lavie made her name with Zero Motivation, a movie about female soldiers who don’t do much of anything, but she has announced that her next film will be about the female observers on the Gaza border who demonstrated great bravery by warning the powers that be about an imminent attack.
They were ignored – more evidence of how their detailed warnings were dismissed is coming to light nearly every day – but they stayed at their posts in the Nahal Oz military base in spite of that and paid the ultimate price on October 7, when Hamas attacked the base and 15 of them were murdered, seven were kidnapped, and two managed to escape.
Seven Eyes
The movie will be called Seven Eyes and will be produced by Spiro Films, which made the television series When Heroes Fly by Omri Givon, and the movies Foxtrot by Samuel Maoz (the last Israeli movie to be shortlisted for an Oscar) and Yuval Adler’s The Operative.
As Israeli filmmakers grapple with how to move forward in the midst of the war and the massacre that started it, directors are already looking at dramatizing some of the most intense stories from this conflict. Director Ayelet Menahemi and screenwriter Eleanor Sela, who made Seven Blessings, are at work on a movie about the first female tank crew to hold off the terrorists in battle that day.
Lavie, whose debut feature, Zero Motivation, won the Best Narrative Feature Award and the Nora Ephron Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2014, is seen as a strong feminist voice in the Israeli movie industry. Zero Motivation is a story about female soldiers who are not taken seriously by the military brass, which has a comic outcome; but Seven Eyes will be about the tragic consequences for an entire country of not listening to the findings discovered by the young women who were the country’s eyes on the Gaza border.
Lavie also made the dark, rom-com Honeymoon, which starts just after a wedding and portrays the increasingly unhinged newlyweds on a nighttime odyssey across Jerusalem; and Sad City Girls, a television series about female friendship that played at Canneseries in 2022.
Lavie is a graduate of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, and the short student film she made there, Shibolet Bakafe, tells the surreal story of a waitress in a café at the famous “mifletzet” or monster statue in Jerusalem, and it is considered one of the best student films of all time.
Lavie is currently at work on the Seven Eyes screenplay. Lior Elefant, the chair of the Israeli Filmmakers and Television Creators Forum, said in a statement, “We are asking for [the public’s] help in searching for former female soldiers who served as observers during the last decade, with priority given to the Gaza Division but also in other places.”