Tom Shoval made the film A Letter to David as a way to ensure that his friend David Cunio was not just a face on a kidnapped poster after the Hamas-led massacre on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The material coming in the day of the attack, which left at least 1,200 people dead, was “uncensored, unfiltered, with no dignity, no way to look at perspective and to understand something – just horror, horror, horror,” Shoval notes.
“It was this blast of images, of carnage and violence, graphic violence, that almost makes you blind,” he said. “You can’t really see the person. You just see the horror.”
In the film, which premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Fest, Shoval wanted to show that Cunio, who remains hostage, was a man with dreams and nightmares.
“I wanted to show that and release the person from this horror that was blinding us all,” he said.
“A Letter to David” is Shoval’s deeply personal message to Cunio, who starred along with his twin brother in the director’s first feature, 2013’s “Youth.”
The film uses footage from “Youth” along with home video shot by the Cunios during the making of that film.
That is contrasted against footage shot by Shoval in Cunios’ kibbutz in the weeks and months after the attack, showing how the community was changed by it.
“I felt that I have to talk to him somehow,” said Shoval. “I’m a filmmaker and this is the only way I can approach it.”
In the intimate home video footage, the Cunio twins shoot their day-to-day lives at Kibbutz Nir Oz, wandering around orange grove, pulling pranks, flirting with girls. “Watching that old footage was chilling,” Shoval said.
The film was a way to mourn the end of an era, but he does not mourn for David.
“For me he’s alive and he will come back, and the film is a cry of hope for that,” he said.
Shoval hopes that seeing the film will let others get to know David and raise awareness of the hostages’ hard conditions–that “it’s a matter of life and death.”
The ups and downs in hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been “a roller coaster,” said Shoval, but he does not want the continuous existence of the hostages to ever feel normal.
Palestinian militant groups have said that they will release three hostages seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Saturday, but Cunio was not among them.
“It’s worse that we will get used to the fact that there are hostages there and just live our lives,” Shoval said.
If the film awakens audiences even for a moment, to see that this is happening and important, “then I guess it’s worth it.”
