If We Don’t Tell Our Story, Someone Else Will

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, a documentary called NAZA premiered to considerable attention. The film features testimony from twenty-four Israeli military and intelligence insiders about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. But none of them will tell you their name. Their faces are concealed. Their voices are digitally altered. The filmmakers say this was necessary to protect them. In reading the reports about NAZA I find myself asking a question that has nothing to do with any individual allegation in the film. Who gets to create the historical record?

A Document or an Argument?

Anonymous sources can be legitimate and sometimes essential to journalism. But anonymity also makes independent scrutiny more difficult. Even a favorable review of NAZA in The Guardian acknowledged that when nobody is willing to attach a name and face to their testimony, its impact as testimony is diminished. The IDF has publicly disputed at least one prominent allegation associated with the film. And it is worth noting that the film’s producers included The Guardian itself, the same outlet whose reviewer praised it. I am not interested in relitigating every allegation in NAZA. Plenty has already been written about the film.

What interests me is the category question. A documentary does not have to give every argument equal time. Truth is not determined by assigning everyone exactly fifty percent of the screen. But serious documentary filmmaking should demand evidence, context, intellectual honesty, and meaningful scrutiny of extraordinary claims. When a film begins with a conclusion and presents only the material supporting that conclusion, we should be willing to ask: where does documentary end and advocacy begin?

That question matters far beyond any single film. Because film is not simply entertainment. Film becomes memory.

That is not an abstraction. Venice itself is proof of it. In 1938, the festival awarded its top honor, the Mussolini Cup, to Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film presenting an idealized portrait of Hitler’s Germany. Two years later, in 1940, Jud Süss, explicit Nazi antisemitic propaganda portraying Jews as corrupt, predatory, and dangerous, was screened at Venice and favorably received by the Fascist-era festival. Those films did not simply reflect their moment. They helped shape it. They became part of the visual archive of how an era understood the world. Venice has a complicated history with the stories it chooses to honor. That history is worth remembering when a new film arrives on its stages making anonymous, uncontested accusations against the Jewish state.

There is also a potential legal question worth raising. If NAZA is distributed in the United States, and it is, American law provides mechanisms that accused commanders could use to compel the filmmakers to produce the evidence behind their anonymous testimony. A defamation or defamation-adjacent claim in a US court could require the filmmakers to demonstrate that their sources exist, that their testimony is credible, and that the allegations in the film have an evidentiary basis beyond a digitally altered voice. The film’s anonymity is presented as a protective measure. In a US courtroom, that same anonymity could face serious scrutiny. If the evidence is as compelling as the filmmakers believe, they should welcome it.

What the Industry Taught Me

I have spent time working around documentaries, filmmakers, and funders, particularly films trying to tell the human story of Israel. NAZA’s reception confirmed something I had already learned from that experience, and wish were not true. Having an important story is not enough.

A producer can have extraordinary footage. A filmmaker can have witnesses willing to put their names and faces behind their testimony. The story can be historically important, emotionally devastating, and meticulously documented. Then come the other questions. Can the producer raise the money? Is the film marketable? Will the festival circuit select it? Does it fit the narrative through which international audiences have already been taught to understand Israel?

I have watched films telling deeply human Israeli stories struggle to find their way into festivals, not because those stories were unworthy of being seen, but because they weren’t considered compelling enough for the marketplace, or because they didn’t confirm what festival programmers already believed.

That experience taught me something I wish were not true: history doesn’t simply preserve the most important stories. It often preserves the stories that somebody was willing to fund, distribute, and screen. That should frighten us.

The Economics of Memory

As we mark another October 7, I find myself thinking less about what the world remembers from that terrible day and more about what the world will remember twenty or fifty years from now. Every survivor who hid for hours waiting for rescue has a story. Every parent who searched for a missing child has a story. Every hostage has a story. Every first responder, soldier, doctor, and volunteer who ran toward danger has a story. Those stories need to be recorded now, while the witnesses are still here. But recording them is only the beginning.

They need editing, translation, archiving, and distribution. They need to be brought before audiences worldwide. And that requires money, for filming, for legal review, for music rights, for festival submissions, for publicity, for every step between a witness’s testimony and a seat in a theater or a classroom. So, the filmmaker needs the funder. The completed film needs the distributor. The documentary needs the festival circuit to give it credibility and an audience. Those institutions become gatekeepers standing between the witness and history.

There is nothing inherently sinister about that. Festivals cannot show every film. Funders cannot finance every filmmaker. But collectively, their decisions determine which stories millions of people encounter, and which disappear. The harder questions we should be asking are these: are we funding what is historically important, or what is fashionable? Are festivals selecting stories that challenge their audiences, or stories that confirm what those audiences already believe?

The Generation That Will Ask AI

For Jews, we should understand better than almost anyone what happens when living memory becomes history. I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I grew up with the understanding that history does not preserve itself. For my generation, many of these stories still have faces. We knew the people. We heard their voices. We sat across the table from them. Future generations will not have that privilege. Eventually, there will be no Holocaust survivor left to tell a grandchild, “I was there.” And one day, there will be no October 7 survivor left either.

Then what? Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will turn to whatever record we leave behind. They will watch the documentaries. They will search the archives. They will listen to recorded testimony. And increasingly, this is the part that should stop us cold, they will ask artificial intelligence to explain what happened. The answers AI gives them will be shaped by the sources that were preserved, indexed, and distributed. What we preserve today will help determine the answers they receive tomorrow. That is not a distant or theoretical problem. It is being decided right now, in festival selection rooms and funding committee meetings and distribution deals.

Where Are We?

The Jewish community knows how to build institutions. We fund hospitals, universities, museums, synagogues, advocacy organizations, and cultural institutions. We must become equally serious about funding memory. We need documentary funds. Oral-history projects. Digital archives. Translation. Distribution. Educational films. And institutions committed to preserving the testimony of October 7 long after October 7 is no longer front-page news. This is the infrastructure of Jewish continuity, as essential as any building we have ever constructed, and far more durable.

The answer to films like NAZA is not censorship. It is not silencing filmmakers with whom we disagree. It is more testimony. More documentation. More evidence. More Jewish and Israeli filmmakers with the resources to compete on the same stages. More voices, with names and faces attached, willing to put their experiences into the permanent record.

The Responsibility That Falls to Us

As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I know what it means to inherit someone else’s memory. I know the weight of stories that were almost lost. I know what it means to be the generation that still has witnesses. Now we are responsible for deciding what memories our children will inherit from us.

October 7 taught us many painful lessons. One of them should be this: memory is not passive. Memory requires witnesses. Memory requires resources. Memory requires institutions. And memory requires one generation to make the deliberate decision that the next generation will know what happened. We cannot control every film that will be made about Israel. We cannot control what every festival chooses to screen. We should not try. But we can make damn sure that when history goes looking for our story, our story is there. Because if we don’t tell it, preserve it, and fund it, someone else will tell it for us.

And their version may be the only one left for the world to see.