Time and distance often prove a benefit to understanding and processing unspeakable tragedies, especially when tackling them through a dramatic lens. Nonetheless, One Day in October uses immediacy to its moving advantage.
An anthology about October 7 that’s debuting on HBO Max on the two-year anniversary of the attacks—and whose first four installments originally premiered in Israel last October 7—Oded Davidoff and Daniel Finkelman’s miniseries is a collection of dramatized true stories from that distressing day, affording intimate and urgent snapshots of the slaughter from a variety of divergent vantage points.
Poignant and harrowing, it’s an act of memory, confrontation, and healing, as well as a challenge to the world to reckon with, and remember, an unfathomable atrocity.
HBO Max provided press with two of One Day in October’s seven chapters, both of which exemplify the endeavor’s desire to look, closely and agonizingly, at an unspeakable nightmare.
Commemoration is, in part, the focus of its fourth episode, “My Light,” which concerns Sabin Taasa (Yaël Abecassis), a French Israeli who on October 7 was at her home in the Netiv HaAsara moshav in southern Israel with her son Zohar. Two of her other sons, Koren and Shay, were staying with their father Gili (from whom Sabin was separated) at his nearby housing unit, and her fourth child, eldest Or, was enjoying some early morning fishing at the beach when Hamas invaded the country.
Awakened by Zohar, Sabin and the boy took refuge in the safe room that Gili built (and was sure would one day be needed). Gili, Koren, and Shay, meanwhile fled to an outdoor shelter, leaving Or unaccounted for and unprotected from the siege.
Directed by Davidoff, “My Light” moves quickly, immersing itself in Sabin and Zohar’s claustrophobic bunker, outside of which gunfire and Arab voices can be heard. Though a knock at the house’s front door portends potential danger, Sabin, compelled to make sure it’s not her other children, checks it out. There’s, she’s greeted by a couple of Hamas terrorists, and is only saved by the fact that the door is made of concrete—a stark illustration, along with her home’s safe room, of the everyday measures Israelis must take to protect themselves.
Back inside, she and Zohar learn about the madness all around them via the internet and WhatsApp, and as in its preceding episode “Sunrise,” One Day in October captures an acute sense of how, in many respects, the victims and survivors of October 7 experienced the assault through their phones.
“My Light” employs recreated security-camera imagery and narration to help recount its tale, which Sabin herself relays to two distinct audiences—a framing device which underscores the series’ focus on forcing people to cope with the stark realities of October 7.
During the second of those chats, Sabin is denied the opportunity to show footage from the beach where Or was killed, and is then asked by a journalist about the larger context of the bloodbath. In response, she questions whether the reporter has seen the non-fiction film of the attacks screened across the globe, and upon hearing that he hasn’t, she states, “It’s your role as journalists to tell the truth to the world. So watch the film first.”
One Day in October’s sorrow is mixed with outrage, and in such moments, it aims to right a wrong by making audiences face the unthinkable—a mission that’s slightly undercut by its own unwillingness to depict the ugliest aspects (and real-world clips) of October 7.
Whereas “My Light” balances you-are-there suspense with socio-political critique, “Sunset” opts simply for the former, charting the ordeal of friends Amit (Swell Ariel Or) and Gali (Noa Kedar) as they hide from Hamas marauders in a porta potty at the Nova music festival.
Following a brief set-up, the episode occurs almost entirely inside that rancid locale, where the two young women do their best to stay quiet and calm amidst surrounding gunfire and frightening proclamations from Hamas terrorists, who yell, “Kill them. Kill everyone!” and, in one particularly chilling instance, boast, “Dad, I’m calling you from a Jewish woman’s phone! I killed her and her husband! I killed 10 people with my own hands, Dad.”
Calling for help on their cells and praying for a miracle, Amit and Gali wait and suffer in silence as the hours—visualized by an on-screen clock and tick-tocking jump cuts—slowly pass by.
Davidoff’s staging of “Sunset” is at once up-close-and-personal anxious and a tad too affected; an animated sequence (instigated by Gali staring at a drawing of an evil eye) conveys the woman’s agony and fear but detracts from the you-are-there tension, as do flourishes like projecting her cell phone screen on the porta potty’s walls.
Still, the episode authentically reconstructs Amit and Gali’s perilous circumstances, including with regards to their Hamas persecutors, who are more seen than heard. Or and Kedar’s performances are poignantly harried, and the up-and-down nature of Amit and Gali’s plight—one second gunfire is distant, the next a shadow of a man with an axe materializes beneath the door—is nerve-wracking.
As with “My Light,” it provides a micro slice of a many-sided macro massacre, putting an emphasis on experiential terror and, in doing so, celebrating the understated heroism of mothers, children, fathers, and friends who looked out for each other (frequently at great risk to their own safety) in unholy circumstances.
At the conclusion of each episode, One Day in October presents behind-the-scenes footage of its actors reuniting with their real-life counterparts, emphasizing not just the production’s collaborative underpinnings but, more pressingly, its status as an attempt to heal a national wound that, to this day, remains open and raw.
These end-credits scenes are provided without comment, and yet they speak to the togetherness of Israelis in the aftermath of Hamas’ barbarism, their pain and strength intertwined. Primarily fixated on people rather than politics, while nonetheless allowing the latter to creep into the proceedings when necessary, Davidoff and Finkelman memorialize with anguish and anger. A reminder that October 7 was a multifaceted crime against average innocents, their miniseries dares viewers to see, to listen, to feel, and to remember.
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