October 7 Documentary too intense for broadcast television

Susan Zirinsky, former president of CBS News and longtime executive producer of the news magazine 48 hoursstands behind Paramount+ We will dance once againThe documentary, which aired Tuesday, provides a minute-by-minute, “you are there” look at the murder and kidnapping of attendees of the Nova music festival in Israel by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023. The attack, part of a wider armed invasion that killed nearly 1,200 people, led to the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

Director Yariv Mozer explained Hollywood Reporter that the film’s narrative, told through interviews with surviving festival attendees, relies on extensive use of graphic real-time video footage — including footage recovered from the attackers — “to show the scale of this attack and the brutality of the atrocities against people who were unable to defend themselves.”

Zirinsky, who has also produced documentaries about 9/11 and the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, agreed with Mozer’s argument. But she notes that the material and cumulative effect is more intense “than anything I’ve seen on television in my entire career.” That influenced her decision, through her See It Now Studios (which produces and develops for Paramount platforms), to choose distribution We will dance once again via streaming, not the network.

“Ultimately, I thought, we can’t (run it on CBS) because there’s no way to break it up for commercials,” she says. “With streaming, you make a conscious choice to show it.”

Moser said THR that international buyers took different approaches to airing the documentary. “It’s interesting,” he said. “RTL in Germany decided to air it in prime time, on a linear channel with commercial breaks, which I don’t think has been done since Schindler’s List. Then the BBC, the version they will broadcast, will not refer to Hamas as terrorists. That was the price I was willing to pay so that the British public could see these atrocities and decide whether they are a terrorist organisation or not.”

Zirinsky — who insists We will dance once again “is not a political film,” but “a record of history,” she added to a sequence of text notes she had written at the beginning of the narrative, explaining that the October 7 attack prompted “an Israeli military response that claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry” and that “this film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

For Zirinsky, recognizing that “we can’t tell everyone’s story is key. That was my case,” she adds, “allows us to say there are no winners here.”

We will dance once again is now available to watch on Paramount+.