‘One Day in October’ Director Dan Reed on the Toll of Documenting Terror Attacks: ‘I Once Woke Up Smelling Charred Human Flesh’

Documentary filmmaker Dan Reed, whose work includes Michael Jackson doc “Leaving Neverland” and HBO’s recent “The Truth vs Alex Jones,” has found his calling in getting people to relive “the worst day in their life,” as he describes it.

As well as delving into subjects as grim as child sexual abuse (he won an Emmy and a BAFTA for “Leaving Neverland”) and the Sandy Hook massacre, he has made numerous documentaries about large-scale terror attacks including the Moscow theater hostage crisis of 2002, the 60-hour siege of Mumbai in 2008 and the Nairobi Westgate mall attack of 2013.

How does Reed manage to revisit some of the world’s most barbarous acts without succumbing to despair? By knowing that he is performing a vital role in bearing witness and relaying victims’ stories to the wider public. “I have this sort of mental barrier that gives me an alibi for being there and then also shields me from the direct impact,” he explains.

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But Reed admits that every film he makes “does haunt me.” Earlier in his career, after working in warzones such as Bosnia and Kosovo, he realized that he’d stopped dreaming. “My nights were completely blank,” he recalls. “And I interpreted that as my self-defence mechanism. I once woke up smelling charred human flesh when I was in my house in London, and I just sort of told that memory to go away, and it did, and then I carried on sleeping.”

It’s this psychological armor that carried him through his latest project, “One Day in October.” Filmed over five trips to Israel, the first just a month after the massacre of Oct. 7, the documentary focuses on Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the many Israeli border villages devastated by Palestinian terrorists last fall and one of the hardest hit, with about 10% of its residents brutally murdered and a further 30 taken hostage.

The 90-minute documentary, which will air in the U.K. on Oct. 9, is part of a triptych of films commissioned by U.K. network Channel 4 to grapple with the Hamas attacks and Israel’s response. (Sphere Abacus are repping international sales). The other two films focus on the impact of the subsequent war in Gaza and the West Bank.

Reed chose to hone in on Kibbutz Be’eri because “it had been such a paradise-like place for the people living there,” he explains. “They had this kind of utopian lifestyle.” The village still operates under the communist ethos that underpinned the original kibbutz movement, with inhabitants paid equally and property held in common. It was also home to some of Israel’s most prominent left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists, such as Vivian Silver, who with Palestinian counterparts co-founded numerous groups dedicated to achieving peace and co-existence. Silver was, in Reed’s words, “incinerated in her home” on Oct. 7 while sheltering from the terrorists. (She is not explicitly featured in the documentary simply because it focuses on the eyewitness accounts of those who survived. “You have to make choices,” Reed says regretfully).

The documentary also includes footage of the bloodshed, from CCTV as well as videos livestreamed by Hamas operatives on the day, giving viewers an “almost 360 view of what’s happening.” How does Reed balance communicating the brutality of a terrorist attack without desensitizing the audience? “The issue of horror and violence as pornography is one that’s preoccupied me since the beginning of my career,” he says. In his view the medium of longform storytelling gives viewers a context to and intimacy with victims that engenders empathy rather than titillation. “The opposite of that is a 15 second clip on TikTok of mayhem and murder.”

Victims and their families are also consulted at every stage. Be’eri resident Sandra Cohen, who was holding her 9-month-old daughter Mila when the terrorists fired a bullet into the baby’s head, declined to take part in the documentary. Mila’s death is referenced in passing, via the story of another survivor, but Cohen, who also lost her husband and mother-in-law in the attacks, does not appear on camera.

Meanwhile the families of some young men who were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists at the kibbutz gates after fleeing from the nearby Nova massacre, where 270 people were murdered, gave Reed permission to show their deaths on film. The only caveat was that in footage of the boys’ bodies being loaded into a van to be taken to Gaza, their faces are blurred. “This is not an event that you can watch without your pulse rate being raised, because otherwise, what am I doing?” Reed says. “People have to be shocked, because what we’re watching is a shocking event in human history. So you have to re-weigh up [what to include] at each stage.”

Part of the challenge of getting people to participate is that many will have already been stung by what Reed describes as the “news steamroller,” where reporters parachute in for soundbites and hot takes en masse before disappearing. “You’re constantly apologizing for the media because everyone’s been misquoted, everyone’s been taken out of context,” he acknowledges. “We have a slower cycle, and we are able to come and make sense of all the omissions and the misinformation and sometimes just honest mistakes that the news makes.”

Misinformation – and outright conspiracy theories – are a subject he tackled in his last documentary, about Alex Jones and Sandy Hook. Unsurprisingly, given the Internet age, Oct. 7 was quickly subjected to similar treatment even as the attacks were ongoing. “It’s a sort of denialist syndrome,” Reed says. “[It happens] wherever there’s a massacre, whether it’s in Israel or anywhere else. Going back to the Westgate Mall [attack] in Nairobi in 2013 I remember for the first time seeing some kind of conspiracy theorist website saying that everyone was fake and all the blood was fake. And, you know, I’d met these people, I’d interviewed them and I’d seen the scars. Since then, that’s obviously grown into a whole subgenre of Internet culture.”

Given the amount of footage from the Oct. 7 attacks, the fact-checking process was relatively straight-forward although Reed acknowledges that given the fog of chaos from that day it was important to approach each story dispassionately and objectively. Having combed through all the evidence, the documentarian says it’s clear that, like the other terrorist attacks he has covered, “This was a planned targeting of a civilian community. There’s no other way to interpret it.”

It is precisely that fact which draws Reed to such bleak stories in the first place. “What fascinates me is the experience of people caught in the center of these events,” he says. “One second your life is normal. You’re lying in bed or shopping with your kids and the next second you’re propelled into literally the worst possible situation you could ever imagine.”

It’s in those moments of terror that “our deepest values are then exposed,” he continues. “Do I put myself in front of my child to catch the bullet? Do I save the children before I save my husband? That nightmare zone is a place where human nature reveals itself.”

Like his other documentaries, “One Day in October” examines all that and more. Despite the specificity of the subject matter, it’s a film he thinks can resonate with everyone. “These are all pretty regular people who ended up in these bomb shelters just waiting to be killed,” Reed says. “And that, I think, is everyone’s worst nightmare.”