Tom Shoval, Nancy Spielberg On Gaza Hostage Film A Letter To David

David Cunio and his twin brother Eitan were at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013 as the stars of Israeli director Tom Shoval’s first feature Youth which world premiered to acclaim in Panorama.

The pair, who hail from the Nir Oz Kibbutz in southern Israel, played brothers who kidnap a young woman using a military service-issued rifle in an ill-advised scheme to raise funds to pay off family debts.

The story was pure fiction but the fraternal bond on the big screen was real.

A decade later David Cunio was kidnapped in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack with his wife Sharon Aloni Cunio and twin daughters from their home in Nir Oz, where around 180 of the some 400 residents were either killed or abducted that day.

His wife and children were released in November 2023, but close to 500 days later David Cunio has yet to be released, with the family clinging to the hope that he is still alive somewhere in Gaza.

His younger brother Ariel was also abducted and is yet to be freed too. They are among 73 hostages still unaccounted for in Gaza, with Israeli intelligence suggesting that 38 are still alive, while 35 are presumed dead.

Shoval is back in Berlin this year with his very personal film A Letter To David, capturing the essence of his kidnapped friend and the trauma of brother Eitan, wife Sharon and parents Silvia and Jose Luis Cunio.

Mixing extracts from Youth; footage of the development and shooting of the film, and interviews with family members, the cinematic letter adds flesh and blood to the man now staring out of “Bring Him Home” posters.

The film is produced by Maya Fischer, Alona Refua and Roy Bareket at Jerusalem-based Green Productions, Shoval’s long-time producers on Youth and second feature Shake Your Cares Away, and Nancy Spielberg under her Playmount Productions banner.

Spielberg, whose EP credits include Aulcie and We Will Write Our History, connected with the production through friend Jake Paltrow, with whom Shoval co-wrote Adolf Eichmann trial drama June Zero.

Deadline talked to Shoval and Spielberg about the film as it world premieres at the Berlinale.

DEADLINE: Tom, You’ve been very active in seeking to raise awareness about David Cunio’s situation from when news of his kidnapping first broke. How did this lead to A Letter To David?

TOM SHOVAL: After 7th October, I was in contact with Silvia Cunio. It was very chaotic. Nobody knew what to do and what was really happening. It was kind of fresh and overwhelmingly frightening. She was saying to me, ‘Can you help us raise our voice so we will be heard, and people will know what is happening.’

My immediate response was to tap into my cinema circuit, using the fact that David had been in my film… I felt helpless but I started thinking and went back to Youth. It occurred to me that a lot of elements in the film echoed what was happening.

David and Eitan are the kidnappers and there’s this hidden horror in the movie that we touched on, but we didn’t know what we were touching on. The film has changed. I can’t see it in the same way anymore.

I went into the editing room and tried to make an essay and then I realized it had to be more, that I wanted to shout, and that I wanted to do it for David, and this became the basis of this cinematic letter, A Letter to David.

DEADLINE: You have a strong connection with the Berlinale, but did you have any reservations about attending, given that the Israel-Hamas war is a hot-button topic here, with strong views on both sides, and the fallout over the closing ceremony last year?

SHOVAL:  I really wanted to show the film in the Berlinale. Of course, I feel a bit tense because the situation is so fragile, and people are so emotional. The film is very personal, but a lot of people will look at it through a very broad perspective. I know that there may be a clash but the film, even if it’s personal, belongs in the cinema. We’re closing some sort of a circle. Youth premiered in the Berlinale and David was here, getting all the attention. This is kind of closure and hopefully by doing this closure, we will get a brighter future and David here, with all the other hostages alive and well.

SPIELBERG: We’re all on shaky ground. One of the things that makes us all tremble is that the world is so divided, so polarized. If we can’t get to a place where we can listen to each other, how are we ever going to heal? How are we ever going to move forward when everybody is fighting, screaming, without even bothering to listen? What I like about this film and what I’m hoping is that we do break it down to humanity and trying to understand what a person looks like and not a label.

DEADLINE: The film intercuts extracts from the film with footage of you getting to know the brothers, the Nir Oz kibbutz and also the rehearsals…

SHOVAL: In the process of thinking about this film, I found a kind of a hidden treasure, a box with a lot of unedited material, intended for a kind of PR film showing the process of turning David and Eitan from non-actors to actors. We gave them cameras to capture their lives in the kibbutz. All of a sudden, I was transported back in time somehow and it became part of the film and part of the letter.

DEADLINE: Some scenes from the making of footage are hard to watch such as that showing the brothers rehearsing the abduction…

SHOVAL: I get chilled every time I see these moments. It was like we were dancing or playing. We didn’t feel anything violent. It was an illusion. When you see it now, you see the violence, you can’t escape it.

And in my imagination, I’m asking myself where is David now? What is happening to him now. You imagine a lot of horrible stuff and you don’t want it to be like that.  The film is also looking back at what it is to do cinema, and this connection between cinema and reality.

DEADLINE: You interview Eitan in the burnt-out shell of his home in Nir Oz where he and his wife and two daughters nearly died in the safe room after Hamas attackers set fire to the building. How did you work with him in telling this traumatic story?

SHOVAL: I was in constant conversation with the family the whole time because I didn’t want to anything they did not want to do. They were on board from the start, also we had known one another for many years. I was very gentle with all of them. I was always saying, ‘If at any given moment, you do not feel comfortable, just tell me and we’ll stop, or do it another way.’

DEADLINE: You don’t use any of the footage from the actual day of the attack. Why is that?

SHOVAL:  I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to do that. The moment we got these waves of violent and harsh footage we you couldn’t see anything else. It makes you blind, and you lose the human perspective of what is happening. You had posters of people kidnapped and these condensed images of horror. I wanted to break out of this and show the person behind this tragedy, not some fragmented vision from surveillance cameras with images of the terrorists.

DEADLINE: Nancy, how and why did you get involved in this project?

SPIELBERG:  I was in Israel 7th October. It was the most frightening experiences of my life. As an American, what can I compare it to? 9/11, maybe but just because I live in New York and sort of close to the World Trade Center. In this case, I was told to lock myself in a safe room because nobody knew whether the terrorists were coming. It was a scary experience.

From the minute it happened, all we did was watch all that footage, and unfortunately, it does have such a devastating effect. All the trauma gets repeated over and over again, and you’re almost fuelling this fear and anxiety on a minute-by-minute basis.

I do documentaries. I tell stories. I wanted to tell a 7th October story the same way that I’ve worked on Holocaust films. I think every story is important. Everything has to be documented, but I also didn’t want to go down that route of the brutal footage that was out there.

Jake Paltrow said you need to hear about Tom’s project. It was the right answer for me. It was a way to take this down to the individual and to really focus on this incredible life and this wonderful person.

We all have this innocence of when we were at the height of our lives, weddings and eating an orange in the orchard and goofing around with our friends and little do we know what is waiting down the road for us. Nobody imagines this is waiting in our wildest imaginations.

DEADLINE: How did your collaboration work?

SPIELBERG: We’re all very connected. The whole production team is wonderful. Roy and Maya and Alona, they’re just all so collaborative. I wanted to be the non-Israeli set of eyes. I wanted to be the American audience, to be there to say. ‘The rest of the world maybe doesn’t know the Cunio family.’

DEADLINE: Do you ever worry that by shedding light on David’s story, you could be endangering his life?

SHOVAL: It’s been a dilemma from the start but we want to keep him in existence, we don’t want him to disappear. At a certain point, when there was no deal, people were just walking past the posters, it was becoming part of life, routine. I can’t deal with that. I can’t comprehend that. Me and the family want his voice to heard. Of course, we’re very worried, but this is one of the tools we have.

DEADLINE: The ceasefire and hostage release plan is very fragile. What would your message be to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

SHOVAL: All I can say is that I believe we need to do everything we can  until the last hostage is free and every one of them out of there, no matter what it takes what, this is the only way to go.

DEADLINE: You say by “no matter what it takes”, does that includes via violent means?

SHOVAL: No violence. I just want a deal to be made done, and as soon as possible. There is really no time.