The documentary features interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors, recalling the decisions that brought them to the Max Brenner and Benedict restaurants in Sarona that evening, and how an ordinary night out descended into chaos, bloodshed and loss.
Horror after which, as one interviewee puts it, “nobody is the same as before”.
While we wait for Inbar to join us on Zoom, Spielberg introduces me to a small, fluffy white dog she is minding for her pregnant daughter, Jessica, who has come to America from Israel to give birth.
CCTV footage used in the film
Spielberg’s dog, a poodle, sulks jealously. In the background, there’s a director’s chair emblazoned with the name of her sibling’s latest film, The Fabelmans, based, of course, on their childhood.
Inbar signs in from Madrid and asks Spielberg how she is. “A stressed mess,” she replies. “I forgot how to take care of babies. I am literally scared. I’ve had two children, but the rules have changed.
"They say whatever I did then could kill a child today,” she laughs. “But I’ll probably kill my child before that time — she’s driving me nuts.”
The producer is nothing if not straight talking, and readily admits that when Inbar emailed her out the blue, she was ready to “politely” say she’d pass.
An interviewee in Closed Circuit (Playmount Productions)
But when she watched Inbar’s nine-minute student film (the seed for Closed Circuit) with its interview with Ibrahim Agbaria, an Arab who was dining with his family when the gunmen opened fire, she felt she’d been “ hit by a tonne of bricks”.
She remembered that at the same time as the attack was happening in Tel Aviv, she was dining out with friends in Jerusalem.
“When we walked out of the restaurant, everybody on the street was talking about the attack. Selfishly, the first thing I thought was that could have been me. I know Sarona. My daughter lives in Tel Aviv.
"Although had I said that to somebody who really was there they would’ve laughed at me, saying, but it didn’t happen to you, Nancy.”
It made her consider how quickly people outside Israel get over terror attacks. “We get upset, but then we go back to our lives. We forget about people and the terror they’ve been through.
“But for them, the emotional scars remain.”
Inbar’s plan to tackle post-traumatic stress resonated with her for another reason too. Spielberg has suffered with it ever since she was aboard a flight in 1995 with her daughters, then aged six and two, which flew into a thunderstorm that created turbulence so extreme, the passengers thought they were going to die.
The American airline knew there was a storm ahead, but had not turned on the seatbelt sign, and people were tossing around the aircraft.
At the time, Spielberg said: “I remember thinking at that moment that there is no God and there is nobody who is going to save us.” She tells me now: “I’ve tried to bury the trauma, but it just resurfaces. It’s like eating bad seafood. It just comes back up. You can’t rid your body or your mind of post-traumatic stress.”
Inbar, meanwhile, was on a date in a bar a few hundred metres away from Sarona when the 2016 attack happened. She was aware that something was happening.
“My grandma called immediately to check I wasn’t there, as she usually does. Then, we called each other, the rest of my friends and family.”
She had not planned to revisit the attack for her final project at the Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television, in Jerusalem, but a visit to Sarona to buy an Etgar Keret novel, changed everything.
As Inbar neared the mall for the first time since the attack she had a “strong physical feeling” that “surprised” her, she says.
She had seen “bits and pieces of the terror attack” on the news, and realised that just watching the footage had “made it feel like it happened to me”. When she noticed that there were security cameras everywhere, “I thought there must be a story there.”
She got hold of the CCTV footage and leads to the interviewees from a private contact while the trial of the terrorists was still in progress. They were “moved by my curiosity”, she says. The trial meant she couldn’t get any information from official sources.
Among the people interviewed in Closed Circuit are a young woman whose father died from gunshot wounds; a man who hit a gunman with a chair, and who was shot several times; another man who says the heroic act probably saved his life; and two Arabs who, though also in the line of fire, found themselves under police suspicion in the immediate aftermath.
Despite there being “so many nuances in the Arab society” and “disagreements and different points of view”, the thinking was that all Arabs think the same, says Inbar who says being an Israeli abroad has given her an insight into how that feels.
“In Spain, I feel that every person looks at me as if I’m the face of Israel, but the truth is Israel is home to a range of views.
“You know the joke: two Jews, three opinions — it’s so true. But to those without that information, I am the face of the occupation.”
During Spielberg’s first visits to Israel in the 1970s, the Mehane Yehuda market was bombed, and she was also in the country during the First Intifada. Every time she is back in the Jewish state, her thoughts turn to terrorism, and sometimes her PTSD “starts to creep up”.
Nevertheless, she does not walk around looking over her shoulder in the same way that she does on the New York subway.
“Isn’t it crazy that I don’t stand close to the edge of the platform or wear jewellery?”
When we last talked in 2015, she was concerned about growing antisemitism in America. Eight years on, she says it has got “much worse. I feel targeted as a Jew. It feels almost apocalyptic.”
The country is getting more polarised and “far left is as hateful as the far right”, she says.
And while Israel is also becoming polarised, Spielberg feels safer there because “people watch out for each other. Since the beginning, they’ve had to fight for their survival. So I feel there’s somebody on the street that’s going to help me. I cannot say the same in America.”
That fight for survival has, of course, created its own trauma, and Inbar says that making the documentary forced her to face things she had tried to avoid.
“As a society, Israel has a post-traumatic character.”
The endless cycle of violence is “fuelled with trauma”, she says. “You witness violence so you create violent things, and then it’s the other side that responds.”
Is there a way forward? “I think education and building bridges of culture is the beginning.”k
