Film Captures New York’s Post-October 7 Poster Wars

Hannah Brown

When the now-iconic hostage posters appeared on the streets of New York shortly following the October 7 attack, when more than 250 people were kidnapped by Hamas, many were gratified that these reminders of those taken were posted in their neighborhoods — and then shocked as the posters were torn down.
The disconnect between those concerned for the fate of the hostages — mainly civilians, including 38 children — and those who felt that seeing their faces on lampposts so offended them they had to remove the posters everywhere they saw them is the subject of Nim Shapira’s thought-provoking, in-depth documentary “TORN: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets.”
The movie opened in New York on September 5 and opens in Los Angeles on September 12, which will qualify it for consideration for a Best Documentary Oscar, and it will then move into theaters in other U.S. cities. The film is being distributed by PBS.
Shapira, a creative director and a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been featured at TED, the Tribeca Festival, SIGGRAPH, Slamdance, Cannes’ Marché Du Film, and other venues, was ideally suited to document this strange conflict that virtually no one saw coming. An Israeli working in New York for 12 years, he was in Israel on October 7, 2023.
As soon as the war started, he began working with hostage families to create video clips about those taken hostage, trying to use his experience as a creative director for advertising campaigns to raise awareness of the humanitarian crisis of the hostages. But early on, he felt that these clips weren’t being seen by many people outside Israel.
When he returned to New York three weeks later, he began working on “TORN” to try to make sense of what was happening there.
“I remember seeing a wall of posters on 6th Ave. and 10th when I came back, and it really made me feel seen, it made me feel like my pain is being seen,” he said.

New documentary examines how hostage posters became symbols of solidarity for some, and targets for others, on New York’s streets

But he was surprised — and understandably upset — when he spoke with people in New York he had been friends with for years, “And they were saying, the hostages are actors, or the images of the hostages are AI-generated. These are people whom I knew. We would go out for drinks or coffee, so that really broke my heart.”
After seeing a clip of people ripping down hostage posters, he realized that it was taken in his old neighborhood in Brooklyn. “I remember seeing a viral video, and I was like, this is in my neighborhood, what’s going on?”
Shapira said, “I wanted to do a tikkun olam [repair of the world], or a tikkun ir [repair of the city], over what was happening here. Posters get washed away, the sun bleaches them or fades them away, and people put other things on top of them, and of course, people rip them down.
And so, I wanted to record this, so we would have a reminder of what it was like to live in New York in the winter of 2023. But through that in the movie, I talk about how polarized we are and how fractured the city is … I think that it’s not just about Israel-Palestine, it’s about the lack of empathy in the city.”
Shapira tracked down the artists who created the posters, Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz, Israelis who had just relocated to New York the month before the war broke out. They based them on the pictures of missing children that appeared on milk cartons in the U.S. decades ago.
They were pleased when their posters went up all over the world, but as mystified and upset as anyone else when people began tearing them down. So were many New Yorkers. Shapira interviews Liam Zeitchik, Alana Zeitchik, and Julia Simon, who had friends and family who were kidnapped by Hamas, as well as other New Yorkers who were simply upset by the phenomenon of the posters being torn down.
The teardowns took on a media life of their own, with some videotaping themselves in the act and others who were videotaped by passersby, and who often cursed Israel when approached by people asking them to stop. Two young women ended up on the cover of the New York Post, their hands full of the shreds of posters they had trashed, with the headline, “Not A Shred Of Decency.”
Said Shapira, “New York is home to the biggest Jewish population outside of Israel and home to a huge Moslem population, but there are also so many people in the middle with no skin in the game who were also participating in tearing down the posters… Ripping down the posters really brings everyone together, people from every ethnicity and every age group tore down the posters… It was really the thing to do in the winter of 2023.”
Shapira reached out to many who tore down posters — he said they were easy to find through their social media — but they refused to be interviewed on camera. Some sent written responses in which they referenced Palestinian suffering, but their refusal to sit down for interviews, even for as empathic an interviewer as Shapira, speaks volumes.
“The posters are an interesting lens through which to talk about empathy and belonging, but it’s also about freedom of speech and it’s also about whose pain gets erased and whose pain is more valid and visible on the streets of New York,” he said.
Asked why he thinks no significant counter-effort emerged on the part of the pro-Palestinian camp — why people tore down posters of kidnapped Israelis rather than putting up posters of Gazans who were killed or displaced by the war — Shapira is stumped.
There were some pictures of Palestinians posted, he said, but not nearly as many as of the hostages. “I don’t know why this didn’t catch on … I wish it had,” said Shapira.
Shapira, whose father died before the film was completed, added that for him the past two years have been the worst of his life, and acknowledged that they have been for so many people.
The film has been screened more than 70 times at film festivals and other places, including at universities, where he tried to make sure it would be seen by as diverse a group of students as possible. He also screened it for Jewish communities that do not support Israel, where he faced “an uncomfortable Q&A, but that was an important conversation to have.”
Shapira reflected on how he feels about the film and about the issue of the posters, almost two years after the phenomenon began. “There’s a quote from a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, that says, ‘You can’t enter the same river twice because it’s not the same river and you’re not the same person.’ So, every time I watch the film, I’m not the same person, and it feels like it’s not the same film. I feel like when I made it, I was a little bit more hopeful, or less depressed, or both. You know, at the end of the day, when I made it… I hoped the war would be over in a few weeks. I only wanted to document the poster war because I thought that no one is going to remember it. The news cycle is so crazy, and every day, a million things happen. And everything that’s happening right now is so depressing, with the hostages still being held there, with the horrible humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with the war still going on.”
But acknowledging he cannot influence Hamas or the Israeli government, he feels it was the right choice to document what was going on in his backyard. Still, he noted, “I wish I didn’t have to make this film.”