Documenting the poster wars
Filmmaker Nim Shapira’s ‘Torn’ will be screened in North Jersey
Filmmaker Nim Shapira was in Israel on October 7, 2023. Like just about all Israelis, like most Jews around the world, he was horrified, grief-stricken, astounded by the barbarity, and unable to do anything about it.
Back home in New York, where he’s lived for the last 11 years — he holds dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship — he was shocked again by what he saw.
“The first thing you do is try to understand what is happening,” Mr. Shapira said. “I was glued to the TV, and I also was shocked by the lack of compassion I saw in a lot of people I know, people who were in my circle for the past 11 years, some people who were colleagues of mine and others who were real friends.
“Of course, a lot of them did reach out to me, to ask about me and my family. But I couldn’t help noticing that I saw a lack of compassion from a lot of people, to say the least. I saw comments that the hostages are AI. That the whole thing is fake.
“These are people I know. I was in Israel, with rockets flying. I was in a shelter, and people are sharing chants about ‘from the river to the sea,’ and a video about how we will redeem the land with blood.
“So I reached out to them — I speak some Arabic, so I understood what it said — and I thought they needed to know what they were sharing. But at some point,I had to run to the shelter, because there were rockets.”
The environment kept getting worse. Once he was back in Brooklyn, Mr. Shapira heard from friends “who were invited to a wedding but had to come out politically and say exactly what they thought about it, or they’d be uninvited.” They’d also be uninvited if they said the wrong thing — that Hamas terrorists massacred Israeli civilians, and they did not have the right to do that.
“I had friends on dating apps, who were being cursed on the app for being Israeli. Or for being Jewish.”
Mr. Shapira studied at the Tel Aviv Tisch Film School and came to New York to work at a media company called Interlude/Eko. Now he “wears many hats,” he said. “Many hats.” Those chapeaux mark him as a “filmmaker, creative director and new-media artist,” according to his page on MIT Open Documentary Lab, where he was a fellow a few years ago. “He has won Webby, Addy, Clio, Promax, and Lovie awards for his digital campaigns, interactive experiences, XR projects and music videos,” the webpage continues. His own website, nimshap.com, includes a list of projects that are both impressive-sounding and visually gorgeous.
So when Mr. Shapira realized that he had to do something about the reaction to October 7, because it was so pervasive and so disturbing, he decided to make a film about it. That film, “Torn,” is the first documentary he has directed.
There’s a disclaimer. “I don’t think that you can equate the horrendous things that Israelis have gone through since October 7 to anything here,” he said. “But definitely this past year hasn’t been easy on any Jew, or anyone who is an ally. And that’s why I made this film.
“I want to talk about October 7 and its aftermath. There are so many really, really important films about October 7.” This one is about its ripple effects, a continent and an ocean away.
“The film deals mainly with the poster wars between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians.”
It’s about those posters that appeared right after October 7, the ones with red print and the faces of the hostages, all open and innocent and unknowing, smiling out at us. Those posters that said ‘Bring Them Home Now.’
“They were everywhere,” Mr. Shapira said. “It was a campaign for awareness. People wanted to know about these more than 250 hostages, from all faiths — Buddhists and Hindus as well as Jews and Christians and Muslims — of over two dozen nationalities. It was an international crisis.
“I was a volunteer, putting posters up. It felt like such an important campaign of awareness. But very quickly it became clear that it wasn’t uniting everyone. Suddenly, in my backyard, in Brooklyn, and also all over Manhattan, people were tearing down those posters.
“I thought about how my generation and the generations below mine talk about freedom of speech and censorships. We talk about how social media is affecting our lives. We talk about compassion, or the lack of compassion. We talk about microaggression and virtue signaling.
“And I thought about how putting up and tearing down posters encapsulates all of this, but on steroids.
“People feel that they have to take a stand on it, even if they don’t understand what’s happening. And of course, New York is the city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. It also has a lot of Muslims, a big Palestinian community.
“And then there are a lot of other people who don’t have any skin in the game, but still, they take it very personally. They are tearing down a poster of a baby.
“Why are they doing that?
“That’s why I went on this journey. I wanted to explore what was happening. As a Jew — well, you know, we ask more questions than we give answers. It’s like the old joke about the rabbi who was asked, ‘Why do you answer every question with a question?’ And he answered, ‘Why not?’
“So I wanted to ask questions. I want to understand what is happening.
“For the film, I was able to find 10 amazing interviewees, New York Jews, who are hostage family members or friends.
“Two of them, Alana and Liam Zeitchik, are siblings. They had seven family members who were hostages in Gaza, kidnapped from Nir Oz. Five were released — they were infants and women — but two of them, brothers, are still in Gaza.” They’re David and Ariel Cunio. Ariel’s partner, Arbel Yehoud, was released last week; neither of the brothers are on the list for release yet.
“The two siblings in New York — they heard from a Palestinian friend who checked in with them, but some American friends did not,” Mr. Shapira said. “They did not want to hear.”
In the movie, he started asking about the posters, “and then I zoom out, and ask how they are, how are their families, what’s been going on with them socially, have they been ostracized.”
Another young woman in the film, Julia Simon, talks about her friend Omer Neutra, an Israeli American who was thought to have been taken hostage, although in fact he’d been murdered on October 7. “She talks about how hard it was to go to school” — NYU, where she is and Omer had been a student. “She had been a popular person, and then school became a place where it was really difficult to be,” Mr. Shapira said.
The people he interviewed for the film include “a jewelry designer, Chen Levy, who put out posters every day. Her store — it’s a jewelry store — is being attacked. I didn’t put this in the film, but she said that the hostages are the real diamonds. That’s why she puts out the posters.
“In the film, she talks about being harassed on a daily basis.” She’s consulted with the police, who tell her that “maybe you should take the Star of David down from the store,” Mr. Shapira reported. “And she said, ‘The minute I have to do that, I will leave New York City.’”
Another of the people Mr. Shapira interviewed, Elisha Fine, “took it upon himself to take down posters that are vandalized, replace them, and keep them to collect evidence of what has been done. He talks about it as an element of a genizah” — the repository of books that contain God’s name, have become too old, too worn out, too damaged to be used, but cannot be discarded because they are inherently holy; instead, they are gathered until they can be buried, with respect and honor.
“He started it as a documentary project, and that is in some parallel to why I made the film.”
Why did he make the film? “Posters are paper, and paper doesn’t last,” Mr. Shapira said. “Rain washes it away. People tear it down. I want to do a film that could outlast the posters. I want to make sure that people remember the zeitgeist. That they remember what it was like.”
He talked to the creators of the poster campaign, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, “two Israelis who moved here for an art residency and, found themselves, as any Jew or Israeli would, wanting to do something to help.” They were artists, so they created art.
He also talked to Rabbi Judah Sarna, head of the Bronfman Center at NYU, and to Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at FIRE — to be more formal, that’s the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Aaron talks about freedom of speech, and what’s legal, what’s not legal, and the spectrum in between,” Mr. Shapira said.
“In the film, I weave between interviews, footage of the protests, and of the news, to give context. I’ve also placed a lot of social media clips of people tearing posters down.
“This is a documentary, and so there are a lot of ethical aspects. We talk about the lack of compassion, but I wouldn’t consider myself fair if I didn’t ask for the opinion of the other side. But no one would talk to me. I did reach out to lots of people who tore down posters, but either I got no response, or they said, ‘I already said everything that I have to say online.’
“So I use the clips of social media.”
The people in interviews are a cross-section of New York Jews, Mr. Shapira said. “Young and old, liberal and conservative, men and women, Ashkenazi and Sephardi.”
It usually takes years to make a documentary film, Mr. Shapira said, but he did not feel he could take that long. The subject is too current. So “this one took less than a year,” he said. “It aired on national Israeli TV on October 7, 2024, and ever since then I have been showing it. I showed it at Columbia and NYU and at Harvard. I’ve shown it at film festivals and at JCCs and synagogues. We had a bunch of screenings until now, and dozens of screenings ahead.”
He showed it at the JCC MetroWest in October; on February 13, it will be screened in Bergen County. (See box.) The list of past and future showings is at www.torn-film.com.
For now, the film is available only in person; eventually it will stream online, but not yet. It’s too raw now, and the need for viewers to connect personally with the rest of the audience, and with the panel that follows every screening, is too real. “The panel is with me and some of the people in the film,” Mr. Shapira said. “It is always fascinating to hear from them.
“People always ask so many questions; sometimes, though, they want to give a statement. People want to share what they have been through.” When it comes to the posters, he added, everyone has a story. “And they’re all different. Some people were attacked physically, or verbally. Some were given help putting them up. One got a felafel from a Palestinian who passed by and wanted to share their pain. Some had the poster ripped down in front of them.
“Every time I hear another story, I think that it should have been in the film.”
Who: Nim Shapira
What: Will show his film, “Torn,” and then moderate a panel
When: On Thursday, February 13, at 7 p.m.
Where: You’ll find out when you register
How much: $18 per person
To register: Go to jfnnj.org — that’s the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey — and scroll down until you get to “Torn.” Then click on it.
For more information: Email welcome@jfnnj.org
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