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Harry Khachatrian


NextImg:The Road Between Us shows why Oct. 7 can never be forgotten

Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us arrives already shrouded in controversy. Its Toronto International Film Festival premiere nearly didn’t happen after organizers briefly pulled it, citing copyright concerns over the use of Hamas’s own live-streamed footage from the Oct. 7 massacres.

I remember that morning well. I’d been invited to a wedding in Jerusalem the next day, a celebration I missed due to prior commitments, but I can vividly recall logging onto Twitter to check the news early on Oct. 7 and watching the first reports of what would become the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Avrich’s documentary returns us to that same morning of terror, seen through the eyes of retired Maj. Gen. Noam Tibon, who embarked on a desperate drive from Tel Aviv to rescue his son’s family in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

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GRIFTING AT SEA. WHO FLOATS GAZA’S BOAT?

The film begins in tranquility. Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon, Noam’s son, recalls falling in love with the serenity of Nahal Oz during an assignment in 2014 and convincing his wife to move there soon after. It was a pastoral corner of Israel, an enclave of citrus trees and playgrounds nestled just miles from Gaza, which, following Israel’s foolhardy 2005 concession for peace, became a launchpad for Hamas’s rocket fire. Yet residents felt reassured by the army’s presence, later replaced with cameras and sensors as the country’s defense priorities shifted northward. “Even a butterfly can’t cross the fence without us knowing,” one officer boasts early in the film.

That illusion of safety was shattered on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023. Woken by sirens, Amir phones his father from the kibbutz to describe an unprecedented barrage of rockets and automatic gunfire. He and his wife barricaded themselves with their daughters in a safe room as Noam, still in Tel Aviv, grabbed his handgun and set off south with his wife, Gali.

Avrich follows that 50-mile journey with harrowing precision, intercutting interviews with Noam and raw footage — some filmed by Hamas itself — of scorched highways, burned-out cars, and bodies littering the road. “Thirty-six years in the military,” Tibon says, “I’ve seen bodies, but never anything like this.” In one particularly haunting sequence, he passes a roadside bomb shelter where festival-goers had sought refuge; Hamas found them there and tossed grenades inside.

The raison d’être of Israel was to make such helplessness — Jews at the mercy of their enemies — impossible. Yet the timing, 6 a.m. on the holiday of Simchat Torah, combined with the scale of the assault, left southern communities cut off and defenseless. Through Avrich’s deft direction, the paralysis of those early hours unfolds with quiet, dreadful patience. In one segment, a Hamas commander is heard barking orders: “We don’t need more hostages — kill whoever you find.” The film shows them moving door to door, executing families, including an octogenarian shot mid-sentence, a book still open in his lap.

Along his route, Noam encounters a blocked road where a small Israel Defense Forces unit is pinned down. Like something out of a Liam Neeson action film, he takes a fallen soldier’s rifle, kills two militants, and helps clear the path. Torn between his duty to aid the wounded and his need to reach his family, he pauses to drive a young soldier to a hospital before continuing. It’s one of the film’s most penetrating moments — a reminder of the moral calculus imposed by catastrophe and of the instinctive fraternity that binds Israelis even amid such chaos and devastation. It is a testament to Barry Avrich’s filmmaking that he vividly conveys this mutual affection and brotherhood, especially in such circumstances.

The salient sentiment that lingers by the final act of Avrich’s documentary is that the massacre of Oct. 7 did not end on Oct. 8 but continues to this day, while Israeli hostages remain captive in the clutches of Hamas — a fact seemingly lost on European and Canadian leaders who giddily lend legitimacy to the terror group by recognizing a Palestinian state at the United Nations. There is a reason Auschwitz still stands: People need to remember. Avrich’s documentary serves the same purpose. It records evidence and emotion alike, preserving both against denial and historical amnesia.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY CALL FOR DISARMAMENT WOULD LEAVE ISRAEL DEFENSELESS

The indefensible fiction that Israel’s current efforts in Gaza are tantamount to genocide is part of a broader effort to undermine and dismiss the gravity of Oct. 7. The fact that major Western cities such as New York and Toronto are allowing terrorist victory tours to proceed, celebrating the slaughter of Jews on the anniversary of Oct. 7, is precisely why this film must be seen and circulated worldwide.

Avrich’s work is solemn and unflinchingly humane, a documentation not only of one family’s survival but of a nation’s unity; the Jewish people bound together in the devastatingly familiar face of attempted annihilation. It is also an important reminder of why Israel exists and what might have happened had it not. Without the presence of a state or of a retired general to rally soldiers to his family’s rescue, the slaughter would have been total. The film stands as both a chronicle and a warning: to ensure that such helplessness never happens again and that forgetting it remains impossible.

Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.