The 60-minute documentary “Screams Before Silence” starts with a warning. Viewer discretion advised. The Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel which launched the still-raging war that has killed hundreds of people, most of them Palestinian civilians are shown in all their horror in director Anat Stalinsky’s film.
Stalinsky’s horrifyingly specific focus is on Hamas’ use of sexual violence as a weapon. She brings us into burned-out homes shot by cinematographer Sasha Gavrikov with an eerie beauty that looks like nothing so much as a horror movie (which, let’s be honest, it kind of is; this review should also carry the biggest trigger warning).
Former Meta COO and “Lean In” author Sheryl Sandberg walks through the wreckage with Chen Goldstein Almog and her teenage daughter Agam. Both were kidnapped last Oct. 7 from the demolished Kfar Aza kibbutz and held hostage for 51 days.
They’re remarkably composed as they return to the scene, but we don’t realize how staggering this will be until Agam stares at the floor while talking about her father: “And I didn’t say goodbye to him,” she says softly, recounting their final moments before he and her sister were shot and she and her mother abducted. “I didn’t hug him or kiss him. I looked at her,” she adds, “and said, ‘Mom, they’re going to rape me now.’”
Many women have similar stories throughout the film, many more have been traumatized by what happened around them. Sandberg goes to the site of the Nova music festival with Tali Binner, who steps back into the tiny trailer where she hid for seven hours.
Binner inhales deeply, and then describes what she heard in the meantime: “There were so many women noises. A girl began screaming for a long time, ‘Please stop, stop, stop.’ And it doesn’t stop,” Binner says, until it does and then there is only silence. “I’m starting to calculate, what’s worse: to get kidnapped, to be raped, to get shot? What’s worse? What’s better?”
When Sandberg expresses surprise that Binner is able to talk about what happened at all, let alone so openly, she replies, “I decided to talk about it after I heard that people are trying to say it didn’t happen. I won’t forgive myself if people are still saying those things I know that it did.”
Her intentions find an echo in former hostage Amit Soussana. “If I can help the people who are still there,” Soussana says after describing her experience, “I want to.” (It has been estimated that there are around 130 Israeli hostages currently being held by Hamas.)
This sense of responsibility runs through the whole film as one person after another revisits nightmarish scenarios to create a record that cannot be ignored or forgotten. Stalinsky focuses almost exclusively on sexual assaults but approaches the subject with artistic restraint and in a range of straightforward ways almost as if, as Binner puts it, she’s afraid it will be too easily dismissed. In addition to interviews along with photos and images captured by Gavrikov, we see copious footage taken by and of Hamas soldiers which bluntly confirms the women’s stories.
Many of the accounts are so grisly as to be unprintable; every now and then the speakers’ controlled compartmentalization falters like when Michal Ohana, who also attended the music festival described by Mendes breaks down after an especially loud noise during her interview. The sound, which is not heard on the soundtrack, resembles a rocket.
Shari Mendes, who was assigned to identify disfigured bodies in the days after the attack, acknowledges the disorienting discord between her words and her composure. “I must seem like I’m disciplined, and cool and calm,” she concedes. “I’m not. But if I start to be emotional I may not be able to continue.”
Sandberg herself loses it when she sees photos of victims that are too graphic to include in the film. “This is the most important work of my life,” she says. “Maybe everything I’ve done has led to this moment.”
But the truth is that, unlike so many people still in Israel and Gaza, she retains the privilege of security even while there it’s who she meets along the way that has borne witness to the day she documents. All we can do from here is listen.
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