Lecture by Shani Kiniso: “And This Day Does Not End”

October 7, 6:29 a.m., the Young People’s Neighborhood in Kibbutz Be’eri. Shani Kiniso and his partner wake to the sound of the alarms and quickly realize that the kibbutz—and everyone in it, including themselves—is under a brutal and unprecedented attack. At some point, Shani becomes a kind of communications hub, sending out rescue messages from people pleading for their lives as everything collapses around them. In between, he finds himself recalling scenes from various horror films, which ultimately help him more than anything else to survive the terrorists’ attempts to break into his apartment, as well as the hours in the safe room until he is rescued.

Shani Kiniso is a film scholar and the author of the manifesto “For an Unimaginable Cinema,” which calls on Israeli filmmakers to express Israeli reality in their films rather than evade it—a manifesto from which a cinematic movement is currently emerging. On October 7, as a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, he was present during and survived the massacre that took place there. In this lecture, he will delve into the slasher genre—horror films known for their graphic violence—in order to tell, through it, the story of his personal salvation on October 7. The lecture will combine the difficult messages from that day, the story of Be’eri and of his family, who also survived, and clips from the films that helped him cope during those horrifying hours. In doing so, Shani will attempt to convey, at least in part, the unimaginable experience of October 7 to the audience.