I’ve not followed it closely, but it seems there’s a clear attack — silencing and efforts to stop any and all disagreements around the horrific policy in Gaza. I’ve not been silenced. I hopefully will never be silenced. It has affected us to the degree that we lost funding. We have had a brutally difficult time fundraising for this film, this issue. I’m committed to making the film available for free. Encouragingly, we just today passed five hundred sign-ups for screenings all around the country and all around the world, and all of them are free.    

The documentary is about the Palestinian journalists, over two hundred of whom have been killed by Israel since the war began. The reason I decided to make the film has a couple of layers to it. Number one, as a Jew from New York City, and as someone who has done a lot of films and work around war, I felt morally — it was a moral necessity that I do something. This was against the advice of many people who were of the school that everything Israel does is accurate, defensible, a reaction to being under attack. I disagreed with that.

The more I researched it, the more I saw clips, the more we heard from people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, the stronger my commitment to doing something became.

Then the question becomes: What could or should we do that wasn’t already being done? Because some of it was being covered — tragically not enough, but some of it was being covered. And I decided to tell the story of journalists on the assumption that the killing of so many journalists, an unprecedented number of journalists, would force the traditional media to write about it. And I was wrong. We’ve had almost zero success in getting any of the more traditional media in the United States to cover it.

On the other hand, we are reaching people, I believe — not the haters, not the people who think any Palestinian should be killed — but we are reaching people who don’t care about the issue, people who don’t see it affecting them and have tuned out. From that point of view, I believe the five hundred screenings are a significant beginning of that, and I think we will help move people to take action.

The other part of it is, there’s a huge racist element in all of this. I felt if we could humanize a few journalists, it would be much stronger than numbers, because numbers are just numbers. Often, when people ask me what Brave New Films does, I say we put a face on policy. This is a classic case of our doing that. So we used the research from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is very robust, very respected. They had [detailed information about] 150, 170 journalists who had been killed.

We went through the research — an extraordinary team at Brave New Films, very small — and we wound up picking three different journalists. The idea was to have some age variety, some mix of gender, and of background. But then most importantly was this: Could we bring them back through social media? So [our team] really dug into the social media accounts. We found this extraordinary footage, extraordinary in retrospect, because the journalists had been killed.

A father and his daughter at a birthday party — simple human things that anybody and everybody could relate to. That was a process that took months of research and finding clips. Then, when there was a relative or a colleague, we’d reach out and let them know we were doing this, both to be respectful, and to see if there was anything we were missing or if there was any footage they had. We actually had people film themselves — extraordinary courage, in Gaza!

The sister [Sabrine Al-Abadla] of the woman journalist [Heba Al-Abadla] we profiled made a video of herself talking about the loss of her sister. Get this — fifty-five of her relatives were killed. The fact that this woman could walk and talk, and wanted to help get the story out there, is extraordinary to me.

Each journalist is different; all human beings are different. What we tried to do was a combination. One was to tell the story of the work they did, for example the story of Bilal Jadallah, who helped found the Press House-Palestine, which was a resource for journalists all over Gaza, a training ground, a way to help provide safety. Ironically, the press vests, which we had all been told would help make them safer, became, according to reports from battle zones, a way that they were then targeted: because their cars said “Press” and their vests said “Press.” So what was meant to ensure safety turned out to do the opposite. We have a clip in the film of journalists taking off their press vests and throwing them to the ground.

The female journalist was Heba Al-Abadla [Al-Azhar radio host and cofounder of the Social Media Club-Palestine]. Her daughter and mother were killed in a raid inside an uncle’s house that they had gone to in order to escape because they thought they would be protected there. That’s when he — it’s so hard to even talk about it — their cousins, their children were all killed. Heba’s sister in the film, in a video that she made for us, talks about how she misses all of them and what it means to her that her sister is not there. Sabrine talks about calling and talking to them a week or two before they were all killed. That’s the last contact she had.

Weeks after, Sabrine and other relatives had hoped that maybe if they went to the place where Heba and her relatives had been, there would be some bodies under the rubble that they could possibly save; or they had hoped that they could pull the bodies out and give them a funeral in line with their religious beliefs. Horribly, none of that was possible. I’ve seen clips recently of people digging with their hands through the rubble in an effort to try and find bodies, remove them, and give them a reasonable burial.

It’s critical to remember that US funding has paid for much of the killing and destruction that is going on.

Ismail Al-Ghoul was well known [he worked for Al-Jazeera Arabic TV network], a young father. One of the reasons why I decided to do his story was that there’s so much footage of him, from the moment he gets married, to his wife getting pregnant, to the birth of his daughter, to spending time with his daughter, and to a scene we found that I guess the mother must have filmed, which shows his daughter at his gravesite kissing his grave. The mother posted on Facebook that whenever the phone rang, the little daughter would say: “Is that daddy calling?” In another part of the film the daughter asks, “Can we go to heaven so I can find and spend time with daddy?”

Targeted killing means Israel’s army has decided to try to kill these people. The Committee to Protect Journalists has very strict standards for what counts as “targeted” versus what counts as “killed.” Their research has them saying twenty, twenty-five targeted journalists. Other organizations have higher numbers. I don’t take a position on that, because it’s a way to divert from the most important question, which is: How do we stop this?

It’s possible that some of the two hundred-plus deaths are accidents. It’s hard to prove that all of them are targeted. But even in instances where it is not clear whether they are targeted or not, there are strong cases to be made that, at some level, there’s some awareness, knowledge, or information that would make it clear that they were journalists.

Why would you kill journalists? If you don’t want the story to come out, that’s what you do. And why would you kill people working in the healthcare system? Why would you starve a population?

The way we got the footage was twofold. First, it was given to us by friends, relatives, and colleagues of some of the journalists who’ve been killed. Second, and most importantly, it was through social media. It’s been an extraordinary, painful — though in no way near as painful as having friends and relatives killed — process of digging through Facebook and Instagram particularly, and finding all of the stories of people’s lives. And then recreating those lives with the footage, therefore telling the story of people at work, of their families, their lives, and then their deaths.

Some of the footage is harrowing, particularly around seeing the journalists immediately after the deaths, seeing others’ emotional responses. I didn’t want to make a film that was nonstop horrific images because nobody would watch it. Our job, without in any way compromising, is to communicate the humanity of these people who, in many ways — in their deaths — have been ignored, dismissed, and become mere numbers. Our job and our goal, where we can be effective, is to bring them to life through their footage, as well as their relatives’ and friends’ footage. We spent hours and hours and hours, weeks and months, going through it.

It’s probably too soon to give him sainthood, but it’s a wonderful thing. It’s energized people all over the country. He’s stood by a set of principles and moral values, and it’s been an extraordinary victory. They’re going to spend a zillion dollars to try to take him down now. But I’m hopeful. He’s so smart, so good, what he’s built — what everyone’s talking about — which is expanding the electorate, not shrinking it.

I hope there’s a ceasefire; a ceasefire around starvation and a ceasefire around the physical destruction of people and places. I’m not encouraged by Trump’s alliance with Bibi. I’m not encouraged by the fact that — this is why there’s no satire anymore. Bibi literally wrote a letter nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s not fiction. The terms of that ceasefire are going to be challenging. Because there will be one side … Bibi is committed — he’s even saying it now — to eliminating the Palestinian state. I think a ceasefire is important, I think it will save lives — what happens after the ceasefire will be an extraordinary challenge, to ensure that the Palestinian people are not completely obliterated.

What I focus on is: Can we do something to pressure our government, our elected officials, to stop funding the war crimes and genocides of many thousands of people?

Number one, I’m going to spend as much time as possible trying to get people to see, watch, and utilize this movie as a tool for changing our policies. Remember: it’s our money that’s paying for this. If we cut off the financial spigot, it would stop tomorrow.

Number two, I’m going to do work on disrupting deportations, which will be a way to encourage and support those who are taking action in the form of nonviolent civil disobedience to stop what ICE is doing.

I hope readers will sign up, get a link to the film, screen it at home, at school, at a workplace, at a mosque, at a church, at a synagogue, and make a difference. We cannot — silence is complicity. This is a time when we don’t want to look back, as many people did during World War II, and say, “Why didn’t I do something?” Something needs to be done now. I hope people will use the film to as a tool to do something.