Stream It Or Skip It?
One Day In October, created by Oded Davidoff and Daniel Finkelman, is a drama that presents stories of survivors of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas terrorists. It’s presented in anthology format, with the real people whose stories are being told shown at the end of each episode, interacting with the actors who played them in each episode.
Opening Shot: A car speeds down a highway, with two women listening to EDM music on the stereo.
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The Gist: Fox, who produces One Day In October with a number of production companies inside and outside of Israel, sent us two 35-minute episodes to review.
One is entitled “Sunrise,” which takes place at the Nova music festival where hundreds of young Israelis were killed. The two young women in the car are Amit (Swell Ariel Or) and Gali (Noa Kedar), longtime friends who are headed to the festival to see a particular EDM act. Early the next morning, when sirens go off and gunshots are heard, the women run into a portable toilet, where they spend the next eight hours fearing for their lives as Hamas terrorists surround them and start to shoot randomly. Their altered states from the night before makes the fear that much worse, but it also allows Gali to get lost in the drawing of an eye on the porta-san’s wall, imagining it moving and protecting them.
In the other episode sent for review, “My Light,” Sabine Tassa (Yaël Abecassis), a French-Israeli woman has been touring around Europe and the United States, with her three youngest boys in tow, telling her survival story. We go back and forth between her talks, that happen months after the attack, and the attack itself. Her husband, from whom she was separated, was killed when Hamas terrorists lobbed a grenade at the shelter build on his property; he fell on it to protect his younger two sons, who then ran injured to the main house, which was protected by concrete doors and a safe room. Tassa’s oldest son, fishing in a nearby town, was also killed. She seems to face reactions ranging from empathy to indifference during her talks, and when a reporter in France interviews her, he gives her a “both sides” question that makes her end the interview.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? One Day In October is one of two shows released today that dramatize the survivors of the October 7 attacks; Red Alert has a more traditional narrative structure, though.
Our Take: One Day In October takes a more stylized approach to telling October 7 stories than Red Alert does, but not just because ODIO is an anthology. Each episode has a different storytelling style, matching the circumstances of the particular person or people being portrayed.
“Sunrise” is the more stylistically daring, because it involves two women at the Nova festival who are fearing for their lives while on mind-altering substances. The camera work inside the portable toilet makes the gross and confined space as large or as small as needed in order to convey exactly what Amit and Gali are feeling at a particular moment. Animations by Israeli artist Pilpeled add to the hallucinatory experience the women went through while they were in abject terror. Real footage of the scene at the festival is shown on the women’s phones.
“My Light,” on the other hand, is told via traditional scenes, security footage, and the flashforwards of Tassa trying to get her message across in France. The message of her story is told in a bit more of a heavy-handed fashion, with scenes of audience members falling asleep or texting while she’s talking, with organizers not wanting her to show video of the beach where her son died, and the reporter’s attempts to make an interview with her into something political.
You would think that the story of people surviving a horrific attack would get people’s attention, but what the writers of this episode are trying to say with those moments is that not everyone buys into the horrors of what happened on October 7. But it was the reporter giving the “both sides” argument that chafed us a bit, because that argument has little to do with the fact that two members of her family were killed that day.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: We see the real Amit Amar and Gali Amar — who seem to be sisters in real life, but not in the scripted version of their story — talking to the actors who played them in “Sunset.”
Sleeper Star: We’ve written about Pilpeled in the past (but can’t find the link the article, because the website has been taken down), and his animations are both haunting and fascinating to look at.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the storytelling on One Day In October can be a bit uneven, the true stories of October 7 survivors, combined with real audio and video, kept us riveted to the relatively-short episodes.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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