By Agatha Khishchenko

[dropcap]Israeli[/dropcap]-American filmmaker Nim Shapira was in his hometown of Tel Aviv celebrating Simchat Torah and his mother’s birthday on Oct. 7, 2023. That morning, he woke up to rockets and watched the news in horror as the number of casualties and hostages rose.

It was a harrowing, life-changing experience. But it was how the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas played out in New York City, his home since 2013 — thousands of miles from the deadly war — that inspired his most recent film, “Torn.”

The film focuses on “Kidnapped from Israel” posters that rapidly appeared around New York City and across the globe following Hamas’ attack, and how they became flashpoints in the culture war over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When Shapira returned to New York in early November, 2023, he, like countless New Yorkers, was drawn to the public street campaign to raise awareness about the roughly 240 hostages taken by Hamas.

The “Kidnapped” posters appeared across the city — subway stations, restaurants, politicians’ offices, traffic poles and much more. Just as quickly as they appeared, anti-Israel voices would tear them down.

The fast-spreading poster initiative provided an outlet for Jewish New Yorkers and others who felt frustrated by their inability to aid the war effort, and felt isolated by their distance from the fighting.

At the same time, the posters became one more front in the battle for public opinion. Many who tore down the posters berated those who put them up and launched a counter-campaign highlighting Palestinian losses.

[dropcap]The[/dropcap] 75-minute “Torn” is playing at festivals and theaters around the country. It explores the motivations of those who both put up and tore down the posters across the city.

“It’s a campaign that works in both physical and online spaces,” Shapria, 42, said of the poster campaign following a screening of “Torn” at NYU last October. “I wanted the film to talk about symbols and what symbols mean to us. When you are thousands of miles away from the conflict, most people don’t have skin in the game, but still participate in tearing down the posters. I wanted to explore this.

“In some way, people tearing down the posters made them go more viral,” added Shapira, who lives in Brooklyn. “I wanted to look at the zeitgeist of what happened and have the film be an invitation for a conversation.”

Among the many subjects of the film are the creators of the poster campaign, Israeli artists Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz, who were in New York City on a three-month art residency when the war began.

“Our Facebook feed was flooded with posts from parents, desperately looking for their children and vice versa,” Mintz says in the film. “We’re in New York, where life carries on as if it’s all normal.”

“We started brainstorming on what we can do,” Bandaid adds. “How to use our expertise to echo the voices of the hostages? It was clear to us that we must do something in the street to capture New Yorkers’ attention.”

Inspired by the missing children milk carton campaign of the 1980s, the married couple printed 2,000 flyers that showed a photo and provided some details about the hundreds of people who were kidnapped that day. They began pasting them up in New York City and tried to enlist passersby to help, mostly to no avail.

Discouraged, the couple posted a Dropbox folder with the fliers on social media and then collapsed into sleep.

“When we woke up in the morning, our phones were just filled with photos and videos from people sharing what they were doing,” Bandaid told the New York Jewish Week last October. “The whole city was filled with posters.”

Julia Simon, a senior at Parsons School of Design, is friends with Omer Neutra, a New York native who was killed during the Oct. 7 attack; his body is believed to be in Gaza. In the film she, too, describes the pain of grieving for her friend while also seeing Neutra’s image torn down or defaced.

“On my commute to school I would see a picture of Omer on a kidnapped poster, but by the time I would get home it would be vandalized in the most brutal way, either torn down, or spray painted, or there was something vile written over it. There was a level of anger and sadness that made me go numb.”

[dropcap]While[/dropcap] Shapira endeavors to talk with and show empathy to those suffering on all sides of the war, he had little success interviewing people who tore down the posters. “I reached out to people from the other side, but all I heard were horrible things or they didn’t want to talk to me. I wanted to have a genuine conversation.”

Instead, the film relies upon TV news footage and social media posts from individuals who were opposed to the poster campaign. The footage shows individuals ripping down or defacing hostage posters, who are then asked why they are doing it and if they would like to share their name. Responses vary from smiling and laughing, to giving the middle finger, to a variety of expletives. Those who engaged on video provided answers like, “Go colonize somewhere else,” “Your posters are propaganda” or “Let’s put up the 3,000 kidnapped kids in Gaza.”

“This film is not for Jews — this film is for New Yorkers, it’s for Americans,” Shapira said.

“My hope is that it’s an invitation to talk about compassion and why compassion is lacking.”