Susan Zirinsky.
Courtesy
Susan Zirinsky, the former president of CBS News and longtime executive producer of its news magazine 48 Hours, is behind Paramount+’s We Will Dance Again. The documentary, which streamed on Tuesday, takes a minute-by-minute, you-are-there approach to Hamas militants’ murder and abduction of Nova music festival attendees in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The attack, part of a wider armed incursion that killed nearly 1,200 people, led to the ongoing Gaza war.
Director Yariv Mozer explained to The Hollywood Reporter that the film’s narrative, told through interviews with surviving festivalgoers, relies on extensive use of graphically violent video material taken in real-time — including footage retrieved from the assailants — “to be able to show how enormous the scale of this attack was and the brutality of these atrocities against people who couldn’t defend themselves.”
Zirinsky, who has also produced documentaries about 9/11 and the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, agreed with Mozer’s rationale. But she notes that the material and cumulative effect is more intense “than anything that I’ve seen put on television in my entire career.” This informed her decision, through her See It Now Studios (which produces and develops for Paramount platforms), to opt for distribution of We Will Dance Again via streaming, not network.
“Ultimately, I thought we could not [run it on CBS] because there’s no way possible to break for commercial,” she says. “With streaming, you’re making a conscious choice to put this on.”
Mozer told THR that international buyers were taking divergent approaches to airing the documentary. “It’s interesting,” he said. “RTL in Germany decided to air it on primetime television, on a linear channel with commercial breaks, which I believe hasn’t been done since Schindler’s List. Then, the BBC, the version they’ll air won’t describe Hamas as terrorists. It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not.”
Zirinsky — who insists We Will Dance Again “is not a political film,” only “a record of history” — added a sequence of text cards, which she wrote, to the outset of the narrative. They explain that the Oct. 7 attack triggered “an Israeli military response that claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry,” and that “this film cannot tell everyone’s story.”
For Zirinsky, noting that “we cannot tell everyone’s story is critical. It was for me.” She adds, “it allows us to say that there’s no winners here.”
We Will Dance Again is now streaming on Paramount+.