On October 7, film-maker Shaylee Atary's home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza was broken into by armed Hamas terrorists.

Her husband Yahav Winner managed to hold off the terrorists, who were trying to get in through the window, so Shaylee could escape with their one-month-old baby out the frontdoor.

Shaylee ran to a shed to hide, but when she realised gunmen were closing in on them, fled again, running across the lawn, now covered with dead bodies, before being spotted on CCTV by a woman, who took them into her home.

Shaylee spent 27 hours trying to stop her baby crying, fearing the noise would attract the terrorists, until they were finally rescued by the IDF. Her coping mechanism throughout the ordeal? To pretend she was directing a movie.

Dan Patterson interviews Shaylee Atary at the TAU film event (Photo: Harry Howells - Spark Creative)

In conversation with producer and writer Dan Patterson at a Tel Aviv University Trust event in London, Shaylee told the audience: “When I ran from the terrorists, it was such an unthinkable situation I never thought I would be in, so it helped me to think: ‘It’s not me; I’m the director of this film.’ Even sometimes, when I was running, I would tell myself: ‘Maybe there is another way to direct this genre.’

“When I hid in a shed, it was so abnormal. I was supposed to wake up and feed [my baby]. That’s all. I had been a mother for one month. So, I told myself: ‘It’s not me. I’m inside a Holocaust film – I’m that character.’ It was very weird for me that cinema can cure trauma, even inside the trauma.”

Tragically, Yahav, 37, was shot by the terrorists, and one of Shaylee’s motives for coming to London – her first trip outside of Israel since October 7 - was to screen his short film, The Boy, which was due to be released.

Film-maker Yahav Winner, who was murdered by Hamas on October 7

“I miss him so much, and this is the main reason I came here,” said Shaylee, who is herself a graduate of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at TAU. “In Israel, I go wherever I can to screen his film. I think Yahav deserved a lot of red carpets as a director. He was very talented, and [I don’t say this] because I’m his wife of 13 years. I did art with him. I was his video editor. When I go and screen his film, I talk about him, and I feel he is a bit alive in the room.”

The couple first met as actors before going on to study film. The London screening showcased The Boy, Shaylee’s own film Single Light and Beetroot Soup, directed by Tom Weintraub Louk, a student at the Steve Tisch School and the cousin of Shani Louk, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

Patterson described Yahav and Shaylee’s films as “prophetic”. The Boy, based on Yahav’s own experience of seeing his best friend’s father killed by rocket fire from Gaza in front of his eyes, is set on Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Single Light is about the day after someone has been the victim of sexual abuse and, said Shaylee, is also autobiographical.

Shaylee Atary at the London TAU film-screening event (Photo: Harry Howells - Spark Creative)

Shaylee said that the making of these films had helped the couple deal with their respective traumas. “Film-making for me is like a healing process. Single Light is based on a personal story of a sexual assault – a situation you don’t have any control over and sometimes, it takes years for you to arrange your broken parts together. Making a film about it helped me cure the parts by combining it all together in one script and finding beauty in the situation I had been through.”

The film focuses on the importance of a friendship the day after the attack. “What happens the day after is that a lot of us women, or men, try not to react, or we put the trauma inside the basement. I tried to show that with a best friend, when you close the door to them, they will come in through the window.”

After his friend’s father – to whom The Boy is dedicated - was killed, Yahav left the kibbutz, later deciding to return there to raise a family. But the trauma never left him. Shaylee said: “He told me: ‘What happens when you see the hell? Can you truly forget it inside those beautiful fields that you grew up in? This is the place I live in; this is our community; these are our friends; but I cannot forget the hell.’ So, Yahav tried to make you understand…the complexity of a person being traumatised but wanting to be with his roots.”

Asked by Patterson what life was like on the kibbutz before the attack, Shaylee described it as “95 per cent heaven, five per cent hell – the rockets have been happening for years - but we never thought it would be 100 per cent hell.”

Addressing other people’s incomprehension of their decision to live so close to Gaza, Shaylee said: “If they knew the community that was on the kibbutz, they might understand why we lived there because it’s a place like you see in movies. We never locked the doors. We left them open so our neighbours could come in.”

“I feel that I knew every person. At Passover, we did the Passover together, all the kibbutz. It’s a unique thing… Even with what happened [on October 7], I don’t regret living there because it’s not the fault of my people on the kibbutz.”

Before the massacre, the kibbutz community had felt optimistic about being able to live in peace with Gazans. “We thought we could live with our neighbours. Before, we had lived for eight years in Jaffa - Arabs and Jews together - but now I feel different because I saw their movement, which they call a government. But it is not a government; it’s a terror organisation, which killed my friends and raped people I knew and girls. I have friends who are hostages, and their families cannot sleep at night. I cannot look at the other side as someone we can make peace with now.”

At the same time, Shaylee says she believes “not all the people are like that; I’m sure there are mothers over there like me. I want to raise my child to go to university – and I’m sure people over there might want the same, so I think it might be different if they have a regular government.”

(l-r) Cara Case,TAU Trust CEO, Dan Patterson, Shaylee Atary and David Meller CBE,TAU Trust chair at the London TAU film-screening event (Photo: Harry Howells - Spark Creative)

On her late husband’s headstone are written the words: “Keep dreaming” because “this was the person I was married to; he was a dreamer. When he lived on the kibbutz as a child, he got his first bicycle from Palestinians in Gaza. He worked with Palestinians in Gaza.”

As if speaking to her husband and others who had, once upon a time, shared his vision, Shaylee said: “You were all dreamers, you all dreamed of a better future of coexistence. Where are you now?”