If there is one overarching takeaway from London-based filmmaker Dan Reed’s latest documentary One Day in October, it is that the era of Israeli peace-loving kibbutznik culture abruptly ended when the gates of Kibbutz Be’eri were breached by terrorists on October 7.
Told through survivors' testimonies, CCTV clips, Hamas dashcam footage and personal videos and audio snippets, One Day in October is a harrowing account of what happened when scores of Hamas terrorists infiltrated Kibbutz Be’eri, killing 101 Israelis and taking 32 hostages.
“I don't think there's an appreciation of how radically it changed Israeli society,” said Reed, who filmed the documentary over several trips to Israel between November and May 2023. “It was like a 9/11 type event, and people's calculations completely changed.”
Reed has directed numerous searing documentaries with his production house Amos Pictures. Among them, Stopping the Steal explored Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, and the controversial Emmy Award-winning film Leaving Neverland exposed child sexual abuse allegations against singer Michael Jackson.
Filmmaker Dan Reed on location in Kibbutz Be'eri for the filming of One Day in October. (Photo: Amos Pictures)
“My job is to find the ground truth and somehow communicate that often inconvenient and complex set of realities to people watching,” said Reed, whose latest documentary does just that.
When the first reports of what happened on October 7 trickled into the media, he was intrigued particularly by the horror of the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri and “the sense of, in a kind of suburban setting, being trapped with your family in your home and being completely helpless.”
One Day in October conveys this sense of nightmarish claustrophobia with chilling ease, showing the juxtaposition between the peaceful family-oriented neighbourhood and the barbed wire fence which failed to protect it from a disaster the residents never could have anticipated.
The fact that the massacre took place in a kibbutz, where residents typically make the same wages, share resources and responsibilities, and advocated for peace with their neighbours in Gaza just three miles away, added another layer of complexity for Reed.
“This is a community that, in a way, echoes the attitudes and the principles of the founders of Israel: sort of secular, socialist-leaning, lefty, and it's slightly utopian,” he said. “But what I realised as I made the film was that these people from Kibbutz Be’eri, who were broadly aligned with that idea, are now radicalised and they mostly do not believe in peace anymore at all.
“It's about the transformation of their mindset from, you know, giving lifts to kids from Gaza to go and get dialysis to: it's over. We don't want to be near you. We don't want you to be near us. Forget it.”
To create One Day in October, Reed and his crew spent weeks getting to know the kibbutz and its residents, discovering a once-lovely neighbourhood now characterised by “shattered homes, the smell of stale blood, [and] bullet holes everywhere.”
Dan Reed in a burnt out home in Kibbutz Be'eri for the filming of One Day in October. (Photo: Amos Pictures)
The documentary features a rare testimony from former hostage Emily Hand, 9, as she details the moment she was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from her friend Hila’s house where she had slept over the night before: “I should have just stayed at home.”
Emily’s is only one among a series of heart-wrenching stories from that Saturday morning, most of which are tales of anxiety-inducing anticipation for the arrival of the IDF as the hours tick slowly by and the residents are left defenseless in safe rooms whose doors don’t lock.
Combing through footage for the documentary and listening to survivors’ testimonies, Reed said he was surprised by how the terrorists and Palestinian civilians who came across from Gaza to loot “had the run of the place for hours and hours and hours” before the IDF were able to begin evacuating residents in the late afternoon.
“I was astonished at how this community and all the communities in the Gaza envelope were just completely abandoned,” he said.
So too were the people of Be’eri, according to Reed and the testimonies he captured: “Certainly in the first few months, there was this intense and very bitter feeling that I think is still there, it's just not being expressed. It's just of abandonment and betrayal by the government and by the IDF.”
Perhaps anger has given way to the more slippery and bottomless sensation of grief. This is the feeling with which One Day in October leaves you, not least because the trauma is so clearly still fresh for those who survived, but also because an entire ethos on life – a peaceful, open-minded kind of ethos – was lost that day.
“The people of Be’eri now think that there's no grey area anymore. There's no more benefit of the doubt – that's over,” Reed said. “And whether you like it or not, that is the world we're in now and it's thanks to October 7. It didn't exist before that; it happened because of the Hamas attack on October 7.”
One Day in October is on Channel 4 on Wednesday 9 October at 9pm.
