“Before Israel had finished counting the bodies on October 7, I was seeing those images and while I think a lot of people were really paralyzed in the Jewish community in America, I just sprung into action. Within two weeks, I wrote a treatment for this film,” said Wendy Sachs, the director of October 8, a documentary about the wave of antisemitism that has swept the US following the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel, which will be shown on Sunday afternoon at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
While the fighting still raged in Israel’s south, Sachs, an acclaimed American documentary director, best known for Surge, a film about female candidates who ran for office and won in the wake of Donald Trump’s first presidential victory, watched clips of a rally in Times Square on October 8.
"I was shocked by the images I saw coming out of Times Square where Hamas was being celebrated as freedom fighters rather than being condemned as terrorists.” Shortly after that, more than 30 Harvard student groups released a statement “blaming Israel for the attack on itself.” Similar statements were released on many campuses and by November she was already filming at a pro-Israel rally.
“October 7 was a wakeup call for Israel, and October 8 was a wakeup call for American Jews,” she said. “I want people to know that this film is not litigating the war, it's not about the Netanyahu government, it's not about the settlements, it's not about Palestinians’ right to a land, and it's not about a land dispute. But it's a look at: How did we get here where Hamas is being celebrated?”
As she started working on the film, she couldn’t get production companies or distributors on board, and instead fundraised herself, which turned out to be “very liberating,” because she could make the film as she saw fit.
She quickly raised over $3 million from people who were happy to back it and allow her full creative control. Many of those who helped fund the film had never backed a documentary before. “Jewish giving changed after October 7,” she noted, as donors who had previously given to universities and other institutions began looking for other places to contribute.
“My fairy godfather was a guy named Teddy Schwarzman who runs Black Bear Pictures and he saw an early cut of the film in July 2024 and said, ‘I want to help you,’” she recalled.
The movie, which is currently available to stream on a number of platforms in the US, including Amazon and Apple TV, also found a distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, run by Tom Ortenberg.
Soon, actress Debra Messing had signed on to be interviewed about her activism, but also to executive produce the movie. “Pretty early on, I was watching what she was doing on her social media and she was so unapologetic in speaking up and speaking out for the return of the hostages and for calling out the hypocrisy and the double standards and the bias when it came to Jewish girls and women, Jews and Israelis, at time when there was so much silence. I was impressed with her outspokenness on social media.”
October 8 is an impressive, extremely well-sourced look that mixes interviews with Jewish leaders, political analysts, academics, authors, actors, students, and others who try to put it all into perspective and offer positive steps for the way forward.
In addition to Messing, the interviewees include author and activist Sheryl Sandberg; US Congressman Ritchie Torres; actor Michael Rapaport; son of one of the founding members of Hamas and former Shin Bet operative Mosab Hassan Yousef; activist and author Noa Tishby; and former Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who has called out the university for failing to address antisemitism on campus. The film also includes many interviews with college students, who detail their struggles on campus.
There is also extensive evidence of how carefully Hamas orchestrated its media campaign, with funding from Qatar, going back decades, including evidence of a meeting of 25 Hamas leaders held in 1993 in Philadelphia, which was recorded by the FBI, in which the participants outlined a plan for “infiltrating American media outlets, universities, and research centers.” This was what Sachs said most surprised her when she started researching the film.
But as much as the film presents facts about the Hamas campaign for hearts and minds in the media, politics, and academia, Sachs knew that she had to make it watchable, or it wouldn’t reach an audience.
“I had to make a film that was not wonky and academic and boring and that it would have to be something that my kids would sit through, that people would sit through who have no attention span… You need to be invested in some characters and then the pacing of the film is just so brisk.” The young university students who are passionate about their activism provide a way into the film for young viewers.
Sachs is donating 170 hours of interviews with 80 interviewees to the National Library of Israel
The film runs just 100 minutes, and inevitably, many of the interviews did not make it into the final version, but Sachs is donating 170 hours of interviews with 80 interviewees to the National Library of Israel, to help future scholars who write about antisemitism.
The movie has succeeded at reaching audiences beyond her wildest dreams, earning $1.3 million at the box office after its March 2025 theatrical release, a huge sum for a serious documentary. “Getting picked up by AMC, which is the largest theater chain in America, was a game changer,” she said.
While she has spent the past year and a half making and touring the world with October 8, she is already at work on a new film, which will be called Poison Ivy.
As the title suggests, it will be an in-depth and “more global” look at how Hamas and its allies have influenced education, both at the university level and in for young children, and will focus on Canada, Australia, and Europe as well as the US. “There will be a deeper dive into social media,” she promised, as well as a look at Doha’s Education City, where students can get a Northwestern journalism degree on Qatari soil.
“I'm probably opening the film with the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky [who were shot to death at the Capital Jewish Museum in May] and the fire bombing in Boulder, Colorado,” an attack on a demonstration for release of the hostages in June, where Karen Diamond was killed.
“What we see now is that things just keep escalating,” she said. “I think if people aren't looking at the big picture, they can miss what’s going on.” But Sachs promised that through her films, she will continue to focus on that big picture.