Posted on September 5, 2025
“I’ve always dreamed of living abroad, but the truth is it’s become unbearably
hard to stay here.”
My name is Shiri Kuban, Amitei Bronfman 2010. I’m a filmmaker and video editor and I live in Tel Aviv with my partner. Over the past two years, I’ve worked on several projects: I was part of the editing team for A Letter to David (a documentary about hostage David Cunio), wrote and directed a short film, and contributed as an investigative researcher for an upcoming feature about the female lookouts of October 7th.
I teach at the Sam Spiegel Film School. This year’s group of students are people who were very directly part of October 7: soldiers, people who lost friends. Many of my students who had been in Gaza came back with footage they shot there, wanting to piece it together, to tell a story, trying to make sense of it all. I watch the footage, and feel that I’m expected to say something meaningful, but what can I say, except that I can’t really make sense of it either. All I feel is an overwhelming sense of chaos, an inability to bring order to reality.
The war with Iran in June was just insane. It’s hard for me to talk about how terrible it was without comparing it to everything that’s happening on the other side, but it was an awful experience.
A missile fell very close to my mother’s house, and I found myself walking around my childhood neighborhood, which was just shattered. It struck me how Israeli it is to just keep going: no matter what happens, the show must go on. The next day you’re expected to show up at work, regardless of whether you’ve been up all night with the sirens or just lost your home. That thought just broke me. I didn’t know what to do, so I started driving around. I bought a tripod (I don’t usually film buildings or static landscapes), and I drove to Be’er Sheva, to Ramat Gan, to Ramat Aviv—looking for the sites that had been hit and filming them. I felt compelled to document the wreckage that wasn’t being shown in the media. The censorship had reached a ridiculous level, and there was this refusal to show the scale of the damage. So I said to myself, I need to have this footage.
I spent hours at these sites, just trying to process what I was seeing. One day I filmed a site where a missile had fallen near a shopping mall. After hours out in the heat, I eventually went into the mall to cool down, and saw that it was full. Outside, people were sweeping glass out of their shattered homes. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by this feeling—that people just want to live their lives. Among the ruins, they just want to live.
Recently, I edited a short video about the woman behind a project called The Daily File, which documents acts of violence in the West Bank and Gaza. Since October 7, she has been documenting all the children who’ve been killed in the war, on both sides of the border. She received the “Truth to Power” award from the New Israel Fund for her work.
One of the most extraordinary things to come out of her project is the Silent Protests. In these protests, people simply stand in silence, holding a photo of one of the children and a memorial candle. Honestly, it’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever taken part in. I’ve been searching so desperately for humanity amid all of this. It’s not about politics; it’s about feeling a sense of humanity and a sense of belonging to the place you call home.
You could say this project is a crack in the wall of silence in Israeli media about the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank—but it’s only a hairline fracture. It’s no accident that the resistance to this truth-telling is so strong. Systematically, it has always been incredibly hard for us to take responsibility for our actions throughout Israeli history. It’s a place we avoid looking at, analyzing, and owning up to. I see it even in my closest circles. There are people whom I can’t even talk to about these things anymore. People have also just become numb to the suffering around them. And, honestly, how can I judge that? While I do judge myself for it, how can I judge anyone else?
Something in our ethos, in our deepest foundation, has shattered. I was raised on the idea that כל ישראל ערבין זה לזה—”all of Israel are responsible for one another,” that we’ll always take care of each other. That was my sense of belonging. But then you look at the government’s total indifference to the suffering of the people—people who have lost their homes, soldiers who are collapsing under the unbearable burden of reserve duty. You look at the families of the hostages. These families have been turned into symbols, something political. I can’t bear people being turned into symbols. They’re no longer themselves—only what they represent.
But then, there are moments like the funeral of the Bibas family. The entire nation had held its breath for the fate of Shiri and her two redhead little boys, Ariel and Kfir, and when their bodies were finally brought home to rest, people across the country filled the streets. Many broke down crying that day. You think: If there’s this capacity for feeling, then where is it? Why isn’t it working? Why are we not succeeding? There’s this slogan from the start of the war, “Together we will win”. It felt real at first. Now it feels hollow.
Everything feels broken. I’m talking about the most fundamental Israeli idea I grew up with in the ’90s: that we’re in this together, whether you’re on the right or the left. The polarization began long ago, and we allowed it to happen. I’ve never understood how I could be called a traitor for holding political beliefs that come from a place of caring for my country.
This past year has felt completely surreal. In the midst of everything, I got married. As an LGBTQ couple, my partner and I can’t marry in Israel. So we flew to France, and something very powerful happened: suddenly I found myself sitting in front of authorities who recognized me. Then you realize just how much you’re willing to absorb, to shrink yourself for this place. You realize: I’m not seen as equal here.
I’m in a relationship with a non-binary person. Last year, my partner had their top surgery, and I started documenting the process. Everything was just so challenging, so new, I felt I needed to film it to make sense of it all. My partner has made such a long journey across the Israeli spectrum to get to where they are today, from a Chabad family in the West Bank, to becoming a probation officer for youth. Yet I don’t feel like this is an accepting or safe space for us, or that we can really talk about these things here.
We’re moving to France this coming November. I’ve always dreamed of living abroad, but the truth is it’s become unbearably hard to stay here. It feels like my place here has shrunk. Fifteen minutes before this interview, it hit me that I’m actually afraid to speak. That realization is frightening—and painful. I know so many people who are afraid to speak.
Our language has been stripped down. I recently read an article about Umberto Eco, who in 1995 published an essay on the 14 signs of fascism. One of them was the erosion of language. That really struck me. As an artist, I feel like I have no space anymore. We no longer have that vocabulary here. I need the space to find the words for things I can’t seem to express here. That’s one of the reasons I’m leaving.
I recently spoke with friends who moved overseas earlier this year. They said, ‘Yes, it’s really hard, but nothing is as hard as staying here’. Because here, it just never ends. The only thing you can do is decide to put an end to it yourself, and leave. Only then will you finally be able to start processing what you’ve been through. No one here is able to process what’s happened over the past two years. And that also serves the system: as long as there’s no end in sight, you can’t stop and say, wait, what’s happened here? You’re just in survival mode.
I think a lot about what it will mean to be an Israeli artist living abroad. I have a short film that’s already in the editing stage, I’ve worked so hard on it, and I know there’s a chance it won’t find its place in the world simply because it’s funded with Israeli money. Still… I try to hold on to the belief that art can speak beyond the reduction that’s happening right now. Over the past two years, I’ve had many moments where I lost faith in what I was doing. Again and again, I’ve had to remind myself that art is still capable of carrying complex emotions and messages, even in times as deeply populist as these—times when identities are being erased altogether. I know I will find myself in very difficult situations. Wherever I go, I will still be Israeli. It’s not something I’ll leave behind. I know I’ll be identified with the actions of my country—actions I don’t support. But I’ll be there to say who I am, and it will go wherever it goes.
Stories matter. There is immense power and strength in telling what’s happening. Because this war is like a massive cloud under whose cover many things can happen. The public is overwhelmed and fighting on so many fronts that it’s impossible to build a narrative; it’s all chaos.
The counter-response to this needs to be constantly telling what is happening. That’s what I value these days: old-school journalists who go out and report on what’s going on.
In that sense, a place like Bronfman has a vital role that could rise above what it is now. A place that shares and encourages a variety of voices, of stories. That’s not something I’m hearing much of right now. I think it’s intentional—not from a conspiratorial place, but from a place where there are so many forces trying to create separation between different sectors, instead of connection.
In the end, I’m an LGBTQ person who sometimes spends Shabbat with a Haredi family in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem—so I know these lives can coexist. That’s okay. It’s possible. It doesn’t hurt anyone. You see this clearly in Jewish communities abroad: the ability to hold such diversity. I think that should be our act against this flattening—not telling one story, but telling the diverse story of many people. The divisions between us are artificial. But for so long we’ve been told that’s how it is, that we’ve turned them into reality.
I think in this era, there is immense significance in dialogue—humane, attentive, patient dialogue. Any space that can encourage this is my silver lining. For far too long we thought everyone should keep their opinions to themselves, stay within their communities. We’ve stopped trying to imagine a shared future. That’s barely even talked about anymore. But that’s the only way to get out of this: to believe in something different.
