'My war is to get it out in the best cities in America'

Israeli director sees Oct. 7 drama ‘Stay Forte’ as his personal war against Hamas

Doron Eran says his fictionalized film about hostages Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samar Talalka, accidentally killed by the IDF, is his way of fighting denial of the atrocities

Against a backdrop of intense documentaries about the October 2023 Hamas-led invasion of Israel, director Doron Eran has released a jarring and powerful feature film telling a fictionalized account of the abduction, captivity, escape, and tragic shooting of three real-life hostages who were mistakenly killed by IDF forces in Gaza in December 2023.

While the film’s characters bear different names from the real-life hostages, Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samar Talalka, who were among 251 abducted in the Hamas-led onslaught, the story echoes a particularly painful moment for Israeli society in the two-year war that followed the slaughter of some 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

“It’s a feature film because the narrative has more power to change opinions, more power than a documentary, and features get bigger audiences,” said Eran in an interview with The Times of Israel.

The film is named “Stay Forte,” an Italian expression meaning “stay strong,” after a tattoo that Haim, a heavy metal drummer who struggled with mental illness, had inked on his arm.

Haim and Shamriz were two of the young men taken captive on October 7 from Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Talalka, who was working the weekend shift at the kibbutz’s hatchery at the time of the Hamas onslaught, hailed from the Bedouin town of Hura.

Seventy days after their abduction, the three men escaped after their captors were killed in heavy fighting with IDF forces. After five days of hiding in Gaza, as the men attempted to let IDF troops know they were hostages, a soldier opened fire at the three figures he had wrongly identified as a threat, and all three were killed.

Most of the details about their captivity came from a BBC interview with Wichian Temthong, a Thai farm worker from Kibbutz Kfar Aza who was taken captive on October 7 and freed during a November 2023 pause in fighting.

The film begins as all four men are abducted to Gaza on October 7 and dragged into a Gaza tunnel.

They are seen in their dirty dugout, as Shamriz uses a broken piece from his glasses, crushed by his captors, to scratch out a map of the maze of tunnels, already thinking toward escape, while Talalka shares a date from his shirt pocket. Haim at first breaks down in disbelief at their captivity: He and Shamriz, the two Jewish hostages, were beaten by their Hamas captors.

There are also imagined scenes when the three men escaped their captors and spent five days wandering around Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood.

Eran, a veteran of action films and dramas, brings a familiar sense of tension to the movie, which can be particularly challenging for viewers who are familiar with the ending of this wrenching story.

Anyone who has read or heard accounts of freed hostages, or watched the recently released footage of six other hostages filmed by their Hamas captors in a Gaza tunnel eight months before they were murdered, will experiences many chillingly familiar moments during the 108 minutes of the movie — and there is no respite from the sense of despair and horror.

Eran saw the film as a personal mission.

“October 7 happened,” he told The Times of Israel, “and it just broke all the things I grew up on. That no one [in the government] took responsibility kills me. It means that anything is allowed, and it’s a very different country from where I grew up. You can make a mistake, but then take responsibility and be held responsible,” referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reluctance to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the Hamas onslaught.

“If I were 25, I would go fight in Gaza,” said Eran, 70, who fought as an IDF soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 First Lebanon War. “I thought, ‘How will I join this war from what I know how to do?'”

A glimpse of a US talk show, in which a guest was explaining that October 7 was fake news created by the Mossad, convinced Eran to make a movie about what happened to his country on that day.

He decided to focus on Shamriz, Haim, and Talalka when he heard Iris Haim, Yotam Haim’s mother, calling the three boys “partisans of our time” during an interview.

“That connected for me,” he said.

“Stay Forte” was filmed in Tbilisi, Georgia, which Eran had learned had tunnels built a century earlier by the Russian government, some 20 to 30 meters (about 64 to 100 feet) underground.

As Eran, his crew, and the families of the hostages entered the tunnels, they all felt a sense of shock, understanding what the captives had experienced, said Eran.

“We just started crying to realize how hard it was to breathe,” said Eran, who developed a lung infection after weeks of filming.

Eran involved the three families in the film’s production, seeing them as partners in his mission to share their sons’ stories and the broader October 7 disaster with the world.

Now he’s pushing “Stay Forte” toward the various awards ceremony panels to get the movie into the hands of the judges and reporters who screen films for the nomination process.

“People have to see it and realize there were two Jews and a Muslim together in the tunnels, being held captive,” he said.

Eran is also planning on getting “Stay Forte” into at least 100 US theaters.

“My war is to get it out in the best cities in America,” he said. “Young people see movies in theaters, and I want them to see it.”

At the same time, the 40-year veteran of the film industry is realistic about the challenges of getting “Stay Forte” shown at film festivals, given the soft cultural boycott being experienced by Israeli filmmakers globally.

“The festival directors are afraid they’ll have a mess, protests,” he said.

One German film festival director asked Eran to take out the lines referring to Gaza civilians who were involved in the abductions and captivity of hostages.

“He was scared of Palestinian protests,” said Eran. “I didn’t even answer him.”