It seems nearly impossible to make a film about the events of October 7th, 2023, and isolate them from any greater geopolitical context. But this is more or less what happens in director Tom Shoval’s highly personal and harrowing documentary A Letter to David (Michtav Le’David), which revisits the massacre that occurred at the Nir Oz kibbutz through the story of twin brothers who, a decade earlier, became unlikely movie stars.
Viewers looking for a sharp analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or a deeper reading of the catastrophic war in Gaza and ongoing hostage crisis, may be disappointed by the movie’s insistence on focusing entirely on one single family’s tragic predicament. But A Letter to David still yields an innate emotional force: the constant cross-cutting between present and past, movie and reality, brother and brother, provides a chilling look at lives that have been both torn apart and captured on screen.
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A Letter to David
Shoval encountered twins David and Eitan Cunio while casting for his debut feature, Youth, a drama about two desperate brothers who kidnap a neighboring girl for ransom. While the Cunios didn’t quite look like matinee idols, they had a raw magnetism, as well as a magnetic connection bordering on telepathy, that made them perfect choices for the lead roles. Youth — which, like David, premiered at the Berlinale — went on to win several awards, including best actor prizes for David and Eitan at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Ten years later, both brothers, who have since become husbands and fathers, were living at Nir Oz when it was attacked by Hamas on the morning of October 7th. Eitan and his family miraculously survived, but David was kidnapped along with his wife and daughters. The latter were eventually released in an exchange 53 days later, but to this day, David — along with his younger brother, Ariel — remains a hostage. (There is hope the two could be released under the current ceasefire deal, if it stands.)
Devastated by what happened, Shoval decided to pen an open letter to David in the form of a film essay. To depict the past, he employs original tapes from the casting sessions, scenes from Youth and other footage that was shot behind-the-scenes, as well as a playful documentary that the Cunio brothers made about their lives on Nir Oz back in 2013. In the present, he returns to the kibbutz to show the destruction wreaked by Hamas, speaking with Eitan in a home that the attackers tried to burn down while the family was still inside.
The testimonies about that morning, whether from Eitan or David’s wife, Sharon, who has since been relocated, are truly shattering. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be a father watching helplessly as your daughters are getting slowly asphyxiated by fumes, but Eitan manages to describe in detail how his family somehow survived such an ordeal. Sharon later explains how David, who was once the tough, fun-loving pillar of the family, started to break down while they were being held hostage in Gaza.
Regarding the latter, no mention is made in A Letter to David about the mass destruction of Gaza since October 7th, and Shoval purposely avoids any political discourse. At one point we hear bombs being dropped by the IDF as Eitan sits in his destroyed home, but nobody discusses it. And while we see plenty of bucolic images of the Cunio family living on Nir Oz prior to the attacks, no one talks about what it was like to reside in such close proximity to Gaza — except for the fact that it requires each home on the kibbutz to have a safe room shielding against missile attacks from the other side.
Rather than highlighting the dire situation that has existed in the region for decades, Shoval concentrates solely on the twins both before and after the massacre, showing how Eitan has been utterly transformed and David is only ever present through his absence. And it’s his very absence that becomes both troubling and fascinating, with Shoval making eerie parallels between the action in Youth and what happened on October 7th (“kidnapped by reality” is how he puts it) — or hinting at the Cronenbergian idea that the brother being held hostage could be mistaken for the one who’s free.
“Whenever I look in the mirror, I see him,” Eitan says at end of the film, and the same thing happens to the viewer: We start seeing David even when he’s not there. If Shoval steers clear of politics and history in A Letter to David, he also steers straight into a living nightmare — or a “reality with no gravity,” as he says early on. The haunting images of the Cunio brothers in Youth leave us to ponder David’s fate not only as an actor in a movie, but in the greater global tragedy he’s now a part of.
