Exactly the gemstone the festival needs
The Israeli actor David Cunio was kidnapped by Hamas. At the Berlinale, a touching and beautiful film reminds us of him and the value of a human life.
By Marlene Knobloch
February 17, 2025
When I last spoke to the director Tom Shoval on the phone, he still had time. It was a year ago in February, the world was not very interested in him, he had just put his children to bed. At that time, he was in mild Tel Aviv, I myself in cold Munich and we were talking about David Cunio, who, tragically, was of little interest to the world.
David Cunio was abducted on October 7. But before he became a face on a hostage poster, he was an actor, brother, father, kibbutznik. Tom Shoval made his first feature film Youth with David Cunio and his twin brother in the leading roles. In 2013, it was invited to the Berlin International Film Festival. Youth was Shoval's debut, and it was also David and Eitan Cunio's first role; they played two brothers who kidnap a girl, hard-pressed for money because of the family's imminent social decline, and the fear of losing oneself, jealousy and a fixation with youth. All of this was crazy enough – was reality so uninspired that it stole from art?
But Shoval was especially surprised why the Berlinale, which otherwise had not been stingy with political messages, did not want to commemorate the kidnapped actor David Cunio? For weeks, the Berlinale was asked to stand up for him and call for his release, as the festival had repeatedly done in recent years for artists associated with the Berlinale. No one responded.
Tom Shoval didn't sound angry that February evening, he didn't blame anyone, but his voice was heavy with disappointment. “Everything must be done to get him released.” A year later, everyone wants to talk to Tom Shoval. For more than three hours, he has been sitting in a room at the Berlin Hyatt Hotel, answering questions from international journalists. Since our phone call, he has made a new film about David Cunio, A Letter To David, and even managed to get Nancy Spielberg, Steven Spielberg's sister, on board as a producer. The Hollywood Reporter reported, the ZDF interviewed him, while world star Jacob Elordi was sitting in the next room.
Shoval looks up with his bright eyes from under the cap that he was also wearing on stage yesterday during the world premiere of his new sad, intimate and very good film. He was nervous because there might have been political comments. “Were you afraid people would suddenly talk about Gaza or Netanyahu?” I ask, while on this same day, Tilda Swinton had emphasized her admiration for the boycott movement BDS in a press conference, which, paradoxically, in turn had called for a boycott of the entire Berlinale, and according to their logic such a movie could never be shown.
"Not afraid,” says Shoval. “But David is not a tool for politics. He is a human being. This is an emergency, it's a matter of life and death. It hurts me that people downplay this fact in order to talk about the big picture. The opposite should be the case.”
Why did he bring this gem to this festival of all places?
And yes, there was one particular moment during the premiere, that could have changed the atmosphere. A miracle, as in these days it is so easy to burn with rage. During the discussion, a member of the audience asked: Why did Shoval bring this great film, this gem, here? To Berlin, of all places, where they teared down the posters of the hostages from the walls, where they only remained in place in the synagogue, and that only because the police guards them, where the 7th of October had been celebrated in the streets, where they did not even want to talk about David Cunio at this festival last year, but had no problem criticizing Israel at the award ceremony? Tom Shoval looked across the rows and calmly said, “I can't imagine a better place for the premiere of my film than the Berlinale.”
It should be mentioned that the new festival director Tricia Tuttle wants to do things differently and promised to apologize to David Cunio for the silence at the last Berlinale. But this story is not about mistakes, omissions, German festivals or good actresses who support the BDS. This is a rare story about the meaning of a human life. About a bond between two brothers that was torn apart. About at least one world that was destroyed. And about how much power cinema ultimately has against reality.
Shoval made the film with archive material from the film Youth. He reads out his letter: “Dear David, I speak to you through cinema.” He interviewed David Cunio's relatives: his twin brother Eitan, who now looks thin and is always smoking, their father, who no longer enjoys anything he eats, and their mother, who says, “I won't wake up again until my boys come back.” His wife Sharon, who David Cunio met through the work in Youth. Now, she only cries after the two little daughters leave the house. And he uses scenes that David Cunio shot himself. Cunio filmed the Kibbutz Nir Oz, the small village where he grew up, stayed and was happy. Dinner on Shabbat with friends and family, his father peeling an orange, the camera zooms through the orange grove, Gaza flickers in the distance, and Cunio says: “The light at the end of the tunnel.” Cut.
We see Eitan Cunio, his twin brother, walking through Nir Oz in 2024. The houses are black with soot, the windows burnt out, debris everywhere, it is now a destroyed ghost village. You can hear distant explosions in the background, bombs in Gaza. There are some moments in this film that will completely devastate you.
Shoval decided against using original footage from October 7. The word “war” is not mentioned once. “The videos and photos of the massacre are everywhere,” says Shoval. “But the sheer horror, the force of the violence blinds you. You can perceive anything other than the horror. And my film is an intimate letter. I want to speak to David, tell him what the kibbutz meant, how close the two brothers were.”
Outside the Hyatt Hotel, someone is celebrating or demonstrating to the sound of Cher’s “Do You Believe in Life After Love”. How will Shoval's life look like when the Berlinale is over? "In my film, you see people on the street walking past the posters of the hostages. That means that the people are okay. They're just doing what they have to do. But I don't want any daily routine until they're back.” Does that mean you're consciously mourning? ”No, not mourning. Staying alert. Alert because what's happening here is not normal.”
As I walk outside along the snow-covered Potsdamer Strasse, I see the pictures of the three Israeli men who were released a few hours ago on my cell phone. How they are standing next to machine guns in the perverse stage set of Hamas. David Cunio's little brother Ariel was also abducted; to this day, no one knows where the two of them are. They are not on any release lists. The last word from Ariel Cunio was a message he sent to his family on October 7: “We are in a horror movie.“