I live in Tokyo, deeply entwined with Israel. My husband and I host Israelis around the clock in our home—hosting milestones and celebrations, accompanying guests through anxiety attacks and ambulance rides, making bunk beds upstairs, and sharing our table in ways that now feel extraordinary.

Over the past three and a half years, we’ve come close to their joy and their loss, which also led me to found the Tokyo Jewish Film Fest and host my podcast. Their stories must be known. There is one short film I wish the world could see. There’s also an initiative I want the world to know about. Both were born from grief and love, and it feels like a race to share. I say “race” as another young Israeli just took his life following a devastating Oct 7th loss. 

Hamedura Hashishit (The 6th Campfire in English) is part of this ever-relevant spark and wound. I spoke with the two creators, Tomer Hadad and Lior Wigderson, about their friendship and their graduation film within the prestigious Bezalel Academy.

Hamedura Hashishit, an animated documentary, or “anidoc”, is a masterful work of love for Tomer’s fellow soldier and friend, Ronen Lubarsky, who died in a 2018 catastrophic terror attack while serving with his elite Duvdevan unit. It was an isolated attack outside of wartime loss; support simply did not exist. 

“There was a lot less awareness about it, so we had to create our own help; this is why we did it,” Tomer says. “When I come back to the first campfire, it wasn’t on the memorial day-it was just something about a week after he died, on an evening that we didn’t want to sit alone in our own rooms and dwell on it and think about it. And so, okay, we said. Let’s go, let’s do a campfire. We gathered somewhere, made a campfire, and suddenly it became a thing.”

If bereaved friends struggled then to find support when Ronen died in 2018, and these same young people now also deal with the depth of newer loss, what must the need look and feel like in the wake of October 7th with newer loss added on? For as many gifted therapists as there are, the need for support remains massive.

“At first”, Tomer says, “we didn’t know what to do with it or how to cope with this day, so we started this tradition of making a campfire, which is “medura” in Hebrew. We do this “medura” each year, and we gather around as friends. It starts as a social gathering,  and we speak, have fun, and laugh. But it’s also a place where we speak of that friend, remember him, tell stories about him, and share our feelings about what happened. Over the years, it became like a ceremony. Since it’s every year, we grow up, and we change, and so the things that we feel about it and the things that we say around the campfire are always different; it’s always something new,” Tomer says.

“The main thing that I wanted to capture is the special atmosphere around the campfire when you’re a part of it, almost a supernatural or primitive thing that is unexplainable in words, especially with something this heavy as a group of young friends who are basically 18. Naturally, when the war began, it was the perfect eclipse for the movie to be created”.

At some point in the film’s creation, they hit a wall. The turning point was when they recorded each friend’s unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks. These voices changed the course of the film and became a new architecture for a film carrying significant........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)