10/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The Israeli director explains how he came to make his response to the 7 October attack by Hamas, and shares a strong plea for the war’s cessation

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

With an 80-minute running time and no official script, Israeli filmmaker Dani Rosenberg can only do so much in Of Dogs and Men [+see also:
film review
interview: Dani Rosenberg
film profile] to unveil his country’s trauma after 7 October, and also condemn the asymmetric response from the Israeli government, which has led to 40,000 deaths in Gaza in under a year. But he’s been able to make an appropriate and ethical statement, taking us to the now-evacuated kibbutzim where the massacres took place and solemnly bearing witness to a nation whose existential despair only continues.

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The film follows 16-year-old Dar (Ori Avinoam, the cast’s only professional actor), who returns to look for her dog in her old home, after her parents were taken hostage. Referencing the title of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Rosenberg is able to reap care, solace and gradual solidarity in a land defined by ongoing savagery. The film screened in Venice’s Orizzonti section.

Cineuropa: The film was shot in November of last year, in the locations where the massacres of 7 October took place. How were you able to respond so quickly to the events and make the film?
Dani Rosenberg: I wanted to be a “fast reader” and not only process it through TV or other media. I felt the camera was sometimes like a shield against reality. And, you know, when my father died, I made a film [The Death of Cinema and My Father Too [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]] with him. Here, it was the exact same thing: using the lens as a tool to protect you and to better understand reality. I felt that reality was so chaotic, and it helped me organise it somehow. But I still didn't know what the story would be. And then I volunteered to take evidence from survivors of the massacre, and I met this teenage girl whose parents were both kidnapped. Her story is, for me, the inspiration for the film’s story.

Tell us about identifying the real-life participants in the film, and incorporating them into the script and your shoot.
In the beginning, I was thinking about writing a script, then I understood very quickly that I just couldn’t do it. I felt humbled by reality, so at that point, I decided I would collaborate with real people who were there, but I didn't know who those people would be. We came to a place near us at the beginning, and we started to meet the community. I said, “Okay, this guy Nathan who just returned today to the kibbutz should be in the film.” And then I heard a story about a woman who rescued animals. So that's how we built it. We didn't know in the beginning what would even be the structure of it. We built it from day to day.

The animated sequence brings a well-achieved poetic dimension to the film. Was it important to move into this dream space, after establishing realism?
It was a way to describe the impossibility for us to understand the other side because, you know, with Palestine, what happens across the border is something that you just watch in various images flooding the screens. Or you even ignore it. So, I saw it like a dream, but the roots of the dream came from Dar’s conscience.

Its focus on animal welfare and animal “otherness” brought to mind writer JM Coetzee. I’m inclined to take the title literally – taken from Steinbeck’s short novel, it implies an equivalence between dogs and men, and not comparing violent men to dogs.
I know JM Coetzee. My wife is originally from South Africa, Coetzee’s country of origin. Before we started the film, I got to know this woman who rescued dogs, and I read stories about dogs that fled to Gaza, and also which returned back from Gaza to Israel as they ran. So, it was this image of a dog in the battle zone. It just touched me on so many levels. The animation came to mind as the first thought for the film before its actual story.

How does it feel to be an Israeli citizen now, watching the military operation in Gaza, with further regional escalation in sight and little sense of when it might cease?
It’s related to the film because if we Israelis want to open our eyes, the Israeli media just won't show at all what's happening on the other side of the fence in Gaza. We can see Gaza only through the screens and through what Dar scrolls through on social media. And all of these images that pounce on you will also block your conscience in the end, because there are so many horrors. We are sitting here, now, more than 11 months after this horrifying war started. It's continued because the leaders from both sides, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, need it for their own survival. Because this war has to end, and the hostages have to return. When Netanyahu started the war, he said that we were doing it to bring them back home, but this war just kills them. And obviously, it's killed more than 10,000 kids in Gaza. It's sheer horror, and it has to stop.