In a remote screening held Wednesday evening in Buenos Aires, the new documentary film by Argentine journalist Alfredo Luco launched in collaboration with director Mariana Blini and producer and journalist Gabriel Ben-Tasael. The documentary bearing the shocking title "Bibas: Murdered for Being Jewish" represents the product of over a year of research and testimony collection, aimed at serving as a tool for documenting the truth and commemorating the memory of the Bibas family members, who were kidnapped from Nir Oz kibbutz during the October 7 massacre. Shiri, the family's mother, and the small children Kfir and Ariel, were brutally murdered in Hamas captivity.
The film opens with chilling scenes from the terrorists' cameras, showing the late Shiri Bibas embracing her two sons, the late four-year-old Ariel and the late nine-month-old Kfir. "I wanted to collaborate with Israel," Luco explained in an interview with the Infobae website. "To do something, pick oranges or something like that. My friends told me I should do what I do best, and that's how the idea arose to create a documentary film about the tragedy of the Silberman-Bibas family."
The documentary traces the family's tragic journey starting from the morning of October 7, when Hamas forces raided Nir Oz kibbutz and reveals how the family members were kidnapped – Yarden, Shiri's husband, was taken by Hamas, while Shiri and the children were separated from him and taken by another group of terrorists. On that same day, Shiri's parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were also murdered in their home in Nir Oz. The film also features Ophelia Roitman, a captivity survivor who was kidnapped from Nir Oz and testified that she saw Shiri passing by her on a motorcycle. "She was very pale and I saw a tear," Roitman said.
Yarden's release from captivity after 484 days and his search for his family are conveyed with emotional intensity to the viewer, as he describes the disturbing process of identifying bodies that included deliberate errors by Hamas. Ultimately, only after nearly a year and a half, the bodies of Shiri and her children were definitively identified, with the post-mortem autopsy report determining that the children were intentionally murdered first. The funeral of Shiri and the children is presented in the film as a display of grief and hope, as thousands of people accompany the coffins in a long procession. In a breathtaking scene, Yarden is seen standing over their fresh grave and saying, "Sorry, Shiri, I couldn't protect you."
The film does not settle for describing the events alone, but rather emphasizes the human and ideological dimensions of the attack. It includes testimonies from close family members, like that of Dana, Shiri's sister, who tearfully recounts the last messages she received from the family and her walk among the ruins of their parents' burned house, as well as from her cousin.
"At first they were calm, and then at some point they just stopped answering," she recounted. "The phone showed that it was in Gaza, but my parents were burned to death here. We discovered this only after 15 days, following examinations by anthropologists of the house remains. Only my father's grill remained standing, as a sad symbol of the Argentine tradition." The film presents the contrast between the kibbutz residents' belief in coexistence and the betrayal by Palestinians from Gaza, who, according to testimonies, raided the kibbutz alongside the terrorists to loot property and received support from the Latin America Foundation Fund, which announced the establishment of a kindergarten in Israel in memory of the family.
