Eitan Cunio has watched the final scene of "Youth" dozens of times before. "But watching it again today is tough," he says. "I hear David sob, and I imagine what's happening to him there, in captivity. His crying is what's hardest for me in the final scene."
In that scene, at the entrance to the apartment building in today's Keshet neighborhood where the two brothers, the film's protagonists, live, David Cunio wears an Israel Defense Forces uniform and holds a long weapon. Eitan, who plays his younger brother, walks quickly towards him until they collide. At first, they struggle with the rifle between them, until David softens, breaks down in Eitan's embrace, and bursts into heart-wrenching tears.in
That painful scene, in director and screenwriter Tom Shoval's debut film, also concludes his new and harrowing film "Letter to David," which will be screened next week at the 75th 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). It's a letter from a director and friend to the beloved and missing hero of the previous film, hoping that once again reality will follow the script, and the nightmare will end in a strong embrace from his friends, the twin brothers.
Once, they used to run around barefoot together throughout the kibbutz. Two children who were one – and in each of them, two. Two halves of the same heart. David and Eitan. On Saturdays, they would wake up early in the morning, turn on the television without waking mom Silvia and dad Luis, run to grandma's house, make omelets with Grandpa Shmuel in the dining hall, and after the meal go play soccer with friends. Enjoying the freedom of a childhood without awareness of an end.
Ariel is the youngest child. He joined the family when David and Eitan were 7 years old. Although the age gap is large, the twins and Lucas, the eldest son, always protected their little brother. "I fell in love with Arbel the day she was born," Silvia recounts. "They weren't friends in childhood, but she always loved him. They've been together for five years, but they only told me about their relationship two years after."
David was born first, Eitan arrived in the world five minutes later. "Everything with them was together," their mother, Silvia Cunio, recounts. "If one was sick and needed antibiotics, the other would have the same symptoms, just without the antibiotics." Eitan nods: "If David disappeared from my sight for a moment, I would immediately worry about him, search and ask where he was. A twin brother is like part of you. You can't explain it."
This thing that can't be explained, and also can't be seen, keeps them always connected. Even now, when David has been in Gaza captivity for 490 days and nights, in the depths of the tunnels. "Every time I think about David, I feel a choking sensation in my throat," Eitan says in the film, and immediately his voice chokes up, and his hand climbs to comfort his throat. "Even now."
In that same abyss of terror, separate from David, their younger brother Ariel is also held captive, after being taken with his partner, Arbel Yehoud (she was released in late January). The Cunio family watched breathlessly during the terrifying moments of Arbel's release. "I didn't breathe," says Silvia, after meeting Arbel this week for the first time in the returnees' ward at Sheba Medical Center.
"The way Arbel held the terrorist's hand tightly when she was released, out of her fear, it was terrible. When I saw her in the hospital, I was filled with strength. Now I have another partner in the struggle for Ariel, and of course for David. We hugged an endless hug. A hug that doesn't end. Tight-tight."
She has known Arbel and her family, as well as Yarden Bibas, Shiri, and the boys, since they were born. She hugged Shiri when she was just six months old, when she was her caregiver in the Nir Oz infant house. The joy and hope that fill her heart after meeting Arbel and Yarden, and also Ofer Kalderon, dissipate when we talk about Shiri and the boys, whose fate is unknown. But "hope remains last. We don't lose hope," she says.
Ariel is the youngest child. He joined the family when David and Eitan were 7 years old. Although the age gap is large, the twins and Lucas, the eldest son, always protected their little brother. "I fell in love with Arbel the day she was born," Silvia recounts. "They weren't friends in childhood, but she always loved him. They've been together for five years, but they only told me about their relationship two years after."
"Ariel, like me, is very introverted," says Eitan. "Very similar to me in personality. David and Lucas are similar to each other in terms of charisma and courage to do things. He's very into sports, really loves soccer, and is also handsome. From a young age, he was very interested in astronomy, and that also created the good bond with Arbel."
In the meeting with Arbel, Silvia hoped to hear information about Ariel, but learned that the kidnappers held the couple together for three hours, then transferred him to another vehicle, and since then she hasn't seen him again. From that moment on, she was alone, completely alone, but coped and cared for a Gazan baby throughout the period. That saved her.
"The flight of tears"
On October 7, director Tom Shoval was in Berlin writing a science fiction series in German. When he turned on his phone that Saturday afternoon, he went into shock. "There was a feeling of apocalypse," he recalls. "I immediately started looking for a flight. I said, 'I can't stay here for a second – I must go home.'"
He called that flight "the Flight of Tears." "I suddenly realize at the entrance to the airport reserve that soldiers are returning to fight and Israelis are returning to the country to comfort relatives in mourning. Everyone was in uncertainty. I've never been on such a flight. You start developing scenarios in your imagination. It was a feeling of fearful anticipation of what we'd see when we got off the plane.
"The first thing I thought about when I understood there was a massacre in the Gaza border communities was David and Eitan, but I couldn't bring myself to contact them because I was afraid of what I'd hear. Only a few days after I arrived, I received a message that David, his family, and Ariel had been kidnapped."
In a cruel and painful irony, in the plot of Shoval's debut film, "Youth," David and Eitan Cunio play Yaki and Shaul, brothers who decide to kidnap a rich girl for ransom to save their family that's fallen on hard times.
"It's a film that was written during the social protest and mainly dealt with the social gaps within us," Shoval explains. "My brother, Dan, and I experienced financial tension at home firsthand. We both loved cinema from a young age, and at night we would build scripts."
That's how the brothers Yaki and Shaul were born, who in the film are not twins. David plays the older brother, who enlists in the army, returns in the first week of basic training with a weapon, and then the decision is made to kidnap a girl. During this time, without the brothers knowing, the unemployed father is already desperate and decides to part from the world. The sand in the hourglass runs out in the background.
On that dark Saturday, Silvia and her husband, Luis Cunio, the family's father, were besieged in their home in Nir Oz. In the house opposite them, Lucas, the eldest son, was hunkering down. Eitan, his wife Stav, and their two daughters were at their home in the kibbutz at the same time. After a quarter of an hour of continuous sirens, they realized it was an unusual event. "I ran to get the phones, and we started to update on what was happening," he recounts. "At seven in the morning we already heard small arms fire. Suddenly a message came from the emergency squad that two terrorists were identified near the clinic, and the instruction was to close windows, lock doors, and stay quiet."
Eitan locked the main door, the shelter, and the steel window, and the two waited. "The shouting in Arabic came closer, and so did the shooting. Explosions started, and we felt the shock wave inside the shelter. I asked Stav, 'What's happening here? I only hear Arabic.' And then messages started coming from kibbutz members – 'They're in my house', 'Come get me out'. I said to Stav: 'Listen, we're being conquered, it's all over the kibbutz.'"
At 8:28, a message was received in the family group from Ariel – "We've entered a horror movie." This was the last message from him. Only after a few weeks did the family learn that he and his partner Arbel were kidnapped, and so were David, his wife Sharon, and their twin daughters Yuli and Emma, only 3 years old.
They also came to Eitan's house. "At 9:10 I heard them taking apart the main door, approaching the shelter – and I'm on the door, holding the handle. Suddenly I smelled gasoline. I looked at the floor and saw splashes of fuel. I told my wife, 'Duck! They're burning the house.'"
"I moved away from the door and heard the flames. A lot of smoke started entering the shelter. I told my wife, 'Listen, we're not going out now – we'll wait for everything to calm down outside and then we'll go out, because now they're kidnapping, killing, I don't know what they're doing.' My wife agreed with me, and we stayed."
For five and a half hours, Eitan and Stav's house burned. "The smoke filled the shelter until it started to cover the whole room. We started coughing, lots of mucus, phlegm. I told her, 'Okay, let's try to open the window a bit, air it out.' I lowered the air conditioner and tried to find the piping, to have an exit hole, but I was already starting to blur, lose consciousness, become disoriented."
At those moments, Eitan sent a voice message to his mother. "Save me," he told her, his voice choking. "I heard the granddaughters coughing in the background, and I started calling everyone – the police, Magen David Adom, Home Front Command, friends," Silvia describes the terrible moments.
"When I tried to summon help, everywhere they told me, 'They're in our house, I can't move.' I tried to approach the door, I thought maybe I could get the girls out, the house was full of flames. I went to the window, but it was hot and wouldn't open, it got stuck in place from so much heat, melted. To this day it can't be opened," Eitan recounts.
"I started losing my mind, I didn't know what to do. I saw my daughters choking to death, my wife was about to not be with me anymore. All the time I checked if they were moving, if they were responding, blinking. They didn't open their eyes. I put my hand on them, to feel if they were breathing, if there was a pulse.
"At some point, little Yuval seemed to be in her last throes. I didn't know what to do. Again, I tried to open the door, but the bolt expanded from the heat so much that it got stuck. I fought with the door until the handle broke. I fainted and woke up, fainted and woke up, a million times like that. And in the middle, after about two hours, my wife and I talked to each other and she says to me, 'Let's say goodbye to the girls.' This is the hardest moment we had."
Eitan pauses. "Wait, it's always hard for me to talk about this. We told the girls, 'We love you.' We did everything, we didn't succeed. We gave a hug, a kiss, and that's it. It became quiet. I sent a last message: 'Come save us, because we're finished' – and I fainted." Eitan woke up to a phone call. Eran from the emergency squad was on the line, with hope – "In ten minutes I'll be with you."
Eitan: "I don't know how I did it: I got up, went to the bolt – and it opened. I collapsed again on the floor. At a quarter past two I heard the door opening."
Eitan, Stav, and the girls were evacuated to the grass. "All the way there were embers on the floor. I walked barefoot, in underwear, because I had given my pants to my wife at the beginning – just so they wouldn't rape her. Like that. These are the thoughts that come to you when you're trapped in a shelter with terrorists around the house."
When they were transferred to the command post, after half an hour Eitan started vomiting. "Something black came out of me, I don't understand what I'm vomiting, what is it, tar? We're in the command post, lying there with one oxygen balloon for all of us. Every time someone else takes a breath of air, and wounded people arrive, and you don't know what's happening with your siblings. I was also finished from the smoke. Only when I left the house, the body suddenly started receiving oxygen and I started feeling all the pains. Suddenly everything burns, the eyes, you can't open them, and all the time they wake you up because you're not allowed to sleep."
Through cinema
While they were recovering from smoke inhalation and injuries, the Cunio family began to fight for the return of the hostages. A few days after Tom returned to Israel, Silvia wrote him a message asking him to try to help, to talk about David and Ariel, to keep them in the media consciousness.
Shoval: "We wrote a few articles about how David, who was an actor in a film that was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, sold for distribution and won awards, is now kidnapped in Gaza. During this, I ask myself what else I can do to help, but also to express myself. I felt helpless. I couldn't come to terms with the fact that life goes on, while David and Ariel and so many others were still kidnapped. The way I know is cinema."
In the documentary film "Letter to David", Shoval uses materials from the first film. "It's saturated with images of kidnapping," says Shoval. "I wanted to use that to tell something about the here and now. I wanted to talk about the gaps between reality and cinema and how the two worlds meet, not necessarily in the natural order."
"Many times, there's a reality that you take to the script. Here, something somewhat opposite happened – David, who was a kidnapper in the film, became kidnapped in reality. These reflections interested me – and through this, I wanted to make the family's cry heard. I started looking for materials and reached 'Green Productions,' which produced 'Youth'. They opened the archive and I found 80 tapes that David and Eitan filmed in the background of making the film."
These materials, which were not edited, became a treasure. "I look at the materials – suddenly Shiri Bibas comes out, suddenly Yarden arrives. You see the family and community life in a period when no one imagined what would happen in 12 years."
Among the footage, Shoval found a video that David filmed in an orchard as they pick oranges, and suddenly David focuses on a path that the orchards create towards the horizon, zooms in and says: "Here's the light at the end of the tunnel."
"And now the tunnel, in the current context, has become like such a prophecy," says Shoval. "Like a person looking at his fate. It moved and chilled me and I realized I have another layer to the story of the film."
In the videos that Shoval incorporated into the film, you see the reflection of David and Eitan in each other. The united family. "The warmth, the intimacy. They built themselves a nest full of love and didn't feel they were sitting on the edge of a volcano. Even though rockets were already falling then and there were rounds, their togetherness was so strong – that it conquered all the anxieties. It was very moving to see that."
Between the videos and segments of the letter to David that Tom reads, Sharon describes in her voice the violent kidnapping of her, David, and the girls. She tells how Emma, Yuli's twin, disappeared in those moments, until she and David were convinced she was gone. For ten days she was separated from her twin and her parents, in captivity. In the background, in one of the home videos that survived the massacre, the girls are seen playing with their father.
Their father, who looks exactly like Uncle Eitan, who still hasn't returned. And there's an invisible abyss in this picture. The abyss that swallowed the hero of the film, who is gone. Eitan doesn't stop feeling the phantom longing for his twin brother and younger brother. Just after the massacre, he could barely look at himself in the mirror.
"Every time I look in the mirror, I see him. David. When I saw his twin daughters for the first time, it was very difficult. They saw me and didn't stop crying. You have no way to deal with being so similar to him. It was also very difficult for Sharon, my sister-in-law. I have behaviors like David sometimes. In the way I express anger, for example, I remind her of him so much, that Sharon can't stand it."
Eitan, perhaps more than anyone else, is the one who can feel David, enter his skin, and feel the fear, the sorrow, the burning longing. The pain. "I met someone in Alumim whom I didn't know," he recounts. "I didn't know much about him, he simply approached me one day and said to me: 'Eitan, I really understand what you're going through.' I asked what he meant, and he told me that while he was fighting in the Yom Kippur War, one day, he felt very unwell. As if he were sick. He felt chills and pains in his body. That evening they informed him that his twin brother was killed in the war. So to your question, if I feel David – I prefer not to feel, apparently."
Tears of joy
This week, eyes filled with tears of joy, relief, excitement – and also terrible sadness and worry. "Seeing Arbel return, it was very mixed," says Eitan. "On one hand, there's great joy that she finally returned, and you don't need to worry about her well-being anymore – she's okay and she's here with her family. On the other hand, you say, but what about David? And what about Ariel? And what about the Bibas family?
"Yarden, who returned, is my best friend – I'm so happy he's back. But Shiri and the boys are still not here, and the uncertainty is the worst thing there is. You know, I met Yarden and Arbel yesterday, and I felt like until today people would meet me and say: 'I don't know what to say.'
"I thought to myself, they're the closest, Yarden is the closest friend to me, like my brother, and I don't know what to say to him. What and how to ask, what's allowed. You sift through what to tell him now and what later, you feel uncomfortable that you don't know how to behave with a person you grew up with all your life. Or with Arbel, you suddenly don't know how to start a conversation."
Q: And how do they feel?
"I won't elaborate, I'll just say that they're strong and physically they're okay. Now we just have to keep going forward. Not stop the deal. The hostages have been through enough and we can't stop – we must get them out of there as quickly as possible."
On the dramas provided by the leaders in Israel with changes in the negotiating team, and in Washington with a plan for evacuation and construction in Gaza, Eitan says: "I think that in the end, the one who tips the scales one way or the other is only President Donald Trump. No matter what Bibi does here, if Trump exerts all his weight on the deal – it will happen."
Q: What would you say to him, if you could?
"I would ask him: 'Use your magic.' That he should want the release of all the hostages more than anything else, that this should be his goal. Without stages and without dragging out time. Do your magic."
