Israeli director sees Oct. 7 drama ‘Stay Forte’ as his personal war against Hamas |
Against a backdrop of intense documentaries about the October 2023 Hamas-led invasion of Israel, director Doron Eran has released a jarring and powerful feature film telling a fictionalized account of the abduction, captivity, escape, and tragic shooting of three real-life hostages who were mistakenly killed by IDF forces in Gaza in December 2023.
While the film’s characters bear different names from the real-life hostages, Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samar Talalka, who were among 251 abducted in the Hamas-led onslaught, the story echoes a particularly painful moment for Israeli society in the two-year war that followed the slaughter of some 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
“It’s a feature film because the narrative has more power to change opinions, more power than a documentary, and features get bigger audiences,” said Eran in an interview with The Times of Israel.
The film is named “Stay Forte,” an Italian expression meaning “stay strong,” after a tattoo that Haim, a heavy metal drummer who struggled with mental illness, had inked on his arm.
Haim and Shamriz were two of the young men taken captive on October 7 from Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Talalka, who was working the weekend shift at the kibbutz’s hatchery at the time of the Hamas onslaught, hailed from the Bedouin town of Hura.
Seventy days after their abduction, the three men escaped after their captors were killed in heavy fighting with IDF forces. After five days of hiding in Gaza, as the men attempted to let IDF troops know they were hostages, a soldier opened fire at the three figures he had wrongly identified as a threat, and all three were killed.
Most of the details about their captivity came from a BBC........