It began with paper.
Days after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks — as war erupted in Gaza and a humanitarian crisis deepened — posters appeared across New York. Faces of 251 people kidnapped from Israel. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews. Children and grandparents. All taken. At the top, one word in red: KIDNAPPED.
And then they started getting torn down. Videos flooded social media. Street confrontations followed. Accusations. Firings. Students doxxed. Politicians weighing in. All over a piece of paper. But it wasn’t really about posters. It was about identity. Grief. Ideology. Who gets to be seen. That’s the story Torn tells. And as its executive producer, I can say with certainty: this isn’t a film about the Middle East. It’s about America — and how the emotional shockwaves of a distant war ruptured life in one of the most diverse cities in the world.
Torn is about a city that couldn’t agree on whose grief mattered. How art became protest, protest became war, and how a lamppost became too loaded to touch.
What began as a grassroots call for awareness turned into a symbolic battleground. It exposed just how fragile our ability to coexist has become. People didn’t just react to the posters. They performed their reactions — for TikTok, for their communities, for the cameras.
Some tore them down. Others taped them back up. Most looked away — not out of cruelty, but because they no longer knew how to respond to someone else’s pain. That may be Torn’s most disturbing truth: how deeply we’ve lost the ability to see the other. To sit with grief that isn’t our own.
This isn’t a film that tells you what to think. There’s no narrator, no score to soften the tension. What Torn offers is access: raw, unfiltered, unresolvable. A city in crisis. A collage of truths — messy, contradictory, human.
If you want a film that confirms your beliefs, Torn isn’t it. If you’re willing to sit with discomfort, it’s exactly what you need to see. Because Torn isn’t just a documentary. It’s a time capsule. A warning. And maybe, if we let it, a conversation starter. This film won’t offer comfort. But comfort is overrated. What we need is the ability to see each other.
Torn dares us to try.
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Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets opened Sept. 5 in New York and New Jersey and Sept. 12 in Los Angeles for its Oscar-qualifying run. Jane Rosenthal is a film producer and co-founder of Tribeca Enterprises. She is the Executive Producer of Torn.
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