‘Of Dogs And Men’: Hamburg Review

Dir. Dani Rosenberg. Israel/Italy 2024. 82 mins.

There can be few more challenging topics for film-makers at present than the attacks and abductions by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023. Any attempt to make a film about this infamous day must touch a raw nerve, both because its violence traumatised a nation, and because Israel’s subsequent retaliation in Gaza has made it so much harder to invoke Hamas’s action without referring to the subsequent war. But Israeli film-maker Dani Rosenberg’s Of Dogs And Men, which is set close to the Israel-Gaza border in the aftermath of that fateful day, in no way obscures Palestinian suffering before or since October. Further debate will surely follow the film’s screenings in Hamburg following its Venice premiere. But for most viewers of Rosenberg’s film, the immediate question will be how adequately it responds to the horror of October 7 – and there, it certainly raises questions.

Rosenberg is to be lauded for approaching this material with emotional restraint

Framed as a fiction but documentary in spirit, the film is directed and co-written by Rosenberg (The Vanishing Soldier), whose 2020 feature The Death Of Cinema And My Father Too showed an acute awareness of the contradictions of portraying reality through the diffracting lens of drama. Of Dogs And Men was shot close to the border and at Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the sites attacked by Hamas, where some estimates suggest that 180 of the around 400 residents were killed or abducted; the film features members of the kibbutz talking directly about their experience.

But the central figure is a fictional 16-year-old, Dar (Ori Avinoam), who wanders around the locale in search of her missing dog in the days after the attacks. At Nir Oz, where deserted homes are seen semi-destroyed or ransacked, Dar meets actual members of the community including Natan Bahat, an elderly man who has chosen to stay on site, and who muses about the current situation of a Palestinian friend living across the border. Dar also meets Yamit Avital, a schoolteacher seen tidying at a now empty kindergarten, and Nora Lifshitz, a woman who rescues dogs that have been stray since the attacks.

The film might be considered trivial in focusing on a heroine whose main concern in this time of nightmare is finding her dog. But it is clear that the animal’s fate stands for many worries that afflict her, including the whereabouts of her mother, extracts from whose diary are heard in voice-over throughout. And the fictional Dar provides the film with the mobile viewpoint of a protagonist who, above all, listens to real people who have endured horror.

Rosenberg has very clearly stated the principles followed by his team – including Avinoam, credited as co-writer – regarding an ethical approach to evoking the attacks and their human effects. The film certainly comes across as a sober attempt to address the unthinkable, avoiding intrusiveness and sensationalism. But it is far from clear how well it succeeds, and perhaps it is not yet possible to fully assess a film made so soon – perhaps too soon – having been shot in the weeks following the attacks. 

Certainly, Rosenberg makes some questionable decisions, one of them to show moments from the attacks and aftermath in footage glimpsed briefly on Dar’s mobile; flicking through, she spares us lingering impressions of extremity, but this framing arguably distances these images in a way that diminishes their power. More contentious is the use of animation (by Michal Faust et al) in which a dog, presumably Dar’s, crosses into Gaza, finding shelter and making common cause with a distressed Palestinian boy. This element brings an uncomfortable charge of sentiment, even kitsch; but it also contradicts accusations that the film elides the pain of the Gazan population, the brutality of the bombardment very being very much in the forefront. And while we hear one angry Israeli demanding eye-for-an-eye retaliation, for the most part the comments of Bahat and others express a wish for peace and understanding between two beleaguered populations.

But whether the film allows us to understand either the horrors of October 7, or their after-effects – emotional, political or otherwise – for Israel and the world, that is another question. Rosenberg is to be lauded for approaching this material with emotional restraint. But the film’s gentle drift and its tendency to art cinema lyricism, delicate music included, mutes its effect considerably, even risks aestheticising the trauma. Of Dogs And Men can be understood as an act of compassion and solidarity, as well as an immediate attempt at groundwork towards an oral history; but, despite its sincerity and ethical caution, it only begins to approach its topic in in a very tentative way.