TORN: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets
Courtesy of Hemdale Films
In the weeks and months following the Hamas-led terror attack against southern Israel on October 7, 2023, it was nearly impossible to avoid social media footage of people across the United States tearing down posters of the 251 individuals, including a nine-month-old child, who had been taken hostage into the Gaza Strip.
Those confronted on-camera provided a myriad of reasons (and non-reasons) for their actions, whether it was labeling the fliers as “Zionist propaganda,” making the claim that such posters were only exacerbating the war, or simply remaining silent.
This snowballing controversy over seemingly simple pieces of paper launched endless online arguments, dominated the news cycle, and gradually began to serve as a microcosm of the fathomless ideological rift among Americans, many of whom view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a zero sum game. Just like the posters themselves, the fabric of a society once based on respectful, nuanced disagreement was being ripped apart in real time.
As Nim Shapira tells me over Zoom, “the posters took on a life of their own.” Heartbroken by what he was seeing, the Israeli-American filmmaker based out of New York City began to ask himself a trio of important questions:
“Can several truths exist at the same time?”
“Is empathy a limited resource?”
“Can we sit down and speak with a person that disagrees with us?”
Shapira broaches all three in his timely, powerful, and thought-provoking documentary, TORN: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets.
“When I first started working on the project, I was sure the war was going to last a few weeks or months,” admits the writer-director, who comes from a background in advertising, VR, and interactive experiences. “It was a challenge working on a film about a war that is still not over and trying to say something.”
Until October 7, however, Shapira never had a real inclination to explore the conflict he’d grown up with in Tel Aviv before emigrating to Manhattan over a decade ago. “I needed to do something and this film [was that],” he explains. “I just had to.”
Nim Shapira next to poster for ‘TORN’
Courtesy of Hemdale Films
Now playing in limited theaters nationwide (click here for screening info), the film delivers an in-depth look at the poster maelstrom — from the inception of the fliers’ now-iconic design by Israeli street artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, to the heated reaction over their going up on surfaces all over Manhattan, to the ongoing despair of the people waiting for their loved ones to be released from captivity.
Ironically, TORN does what the posters were supposedly meant to do in the first place: humanize the hostages.
“There are so many important documentaries that are being done on Israel and Palestine, specifically about October 7 and what’s happening in Gaza right now,” says Shpaira. “I hope it’s not the case with my film, but a lot of these films are [just] preaching to the choir or the audiences that will watch them.”
To that end, the director sought out a wide range of interviewees hailing from different backgrounds and viewpoints: “Young and old, religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, liberal and conservative.”
He even reached out to people who went viral for ripping down posters, though they ultimately ignored his requests or else declined to appear on-camera, with some preferring to anonymously submit talking points.
“I wanted people that were hurt and doxxed because for me, as humans … we’re trying to be better,” Shapira notes. “I tried to at least give them the platform. I reached out to their GoFundMe pages, Gmail addresses, Instagram, LinkedIn — every social media handle that I could find. Whether I agree with it or not, I wanted to bring the pro-Palestinian narrative to the film, finding videos that would contain the most reasons that people could find for ripping down the posters. That was really important for me.”
While TORN may, at first glance, seem outmoded nearly two years into a war that has already claimed so many lives, Shapira actually believes that “distance from the raw winter of 2023 makes the film even more timely. We’re more polarized than ever, and I still hope (perhaps naively) that the film can open space for conversation, even across divides.”
He continues: “Try to put yourself in the shoes of who you were in October, November, December of 2023,” he posits. “That specific winter before the hostages came out, before the first deal [where] almost half of the people that were held by Hamas were released. Think what was in the posters themselves that made you so angry. Was it the fact that the posters were done by two Israeli artists? Was it the fact that Jews put up the posters? Was it the fact that you saw a child and told yourself, ‘There’s no way the people that I speak for would kidnap this kid?’”
When all is said and done, Shapira hopes his film, which he describes as “a labor of pain,” can help break down deeply-ingrained tribalistic barriers and launch a productive dialogue by asking more questions than it answers. The filmmaker is already seeing results after screening the film for dozens of audiences that run the gamut from pro-Israel Jewish communities to student encampments at Stanford.
“I really hope that if you’re if you’re hurting for the hostages, [this film] will be your chance to reflect on what you’ve been going through and ask more questions. If you hurt with what’s happening to the Palestinians, I think [this is] your opportunity to see a narrative of the other side and maybe from that, we can start to bridge the gap,” the filmmaker says. “I have more Palestinian friends because of this film than I did two years ago. I can’t say the same thing about the Americans. So if Palestinians that I didn’t know before watch the film and appreciated the narrative of an Israeli-American Jew, then I ask Americans with no skin in the game to watch it, too.”
Viewing of the conflict as some kind of sports match where one side must prevail over the other is not only inaccurate, Shapira argues, but it dangerously reduces innocent Israeli and Palestinian lives to faceless pawns on a board. If a true and lasting peace in the region is to be attained, it will come through the mutual acceptance that two truths, two peoples can exist at the same time.
“No one is going anywhere,” the director continues. “That’s what people don’t understand. Israel is not going anywhere. Palestine is not going anywhere. There are millions of people between the river and the sea. The only way forward is coexistence, even among the lamp posts and subway stations of New York.”
TORN: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets is now playing in select theaters nationwide. Click here for screening information!