by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
David Cunio, Eitan Cunio, Sharon Aloni
Intro:
... deliberately avoids the political, choosing instead to focus on the intimate and the familial.
The plot of Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval’s documentary A Letter to David is simple: it tells the story of the October 7, 2023 abduction of David Cunio, his wife, and their two young daughters from Kibbutz Nir Oz by Hamas. Yet behind the façade of this tragic event lies a strange coincidence — one that has taken on the weight of prophecy.
Ten years ago, at the Berlin International Film Festival, Tom Shoval’s debut feature Youth premiered. The film starred twin brothers — David and Eitan Cunio — and told the story of two young men who, entangled in debt and desperation, kidnap a young woman in hopes of improving their lives. At the time, it was read as a sharp critique of Israeli society — deeply militarised and riddled with corruption.
On October 7, 2023, Tom Shoval woke up in Berlin to a series of phone notifications. One of them said that his former actor, David Cunio, had been kidnapped. The once simple plot of a fictional film had turned into a grim foreshadowing — and would become the basis for Shoval’s new documentary, A Letter to David.
Footage from Youth, behind-the-scenes moments, and casting clips appear throughout A Letter to David — a film that deliberately avoids the political, choosing instead to focus on the intimate and the familial. David’s wife and daughters were eventually released and returned to Israel, but at the time of the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, David himself was still in captivity, his fate unknown.
As we see him joking with his brother Eitan in archival footage, we can only imagine what horrors he was enduring in Hamas captivity. David and Eitan’s parents speak with heartbreak about waiting for their son’s return, and Eitan himself appears on screen, expressing his longing to one day be reunited with his brother.
Shoval knows this feeling intimately: A Letter to David also features moments from his own life, spent with his brother, film critic Dan Shoval, with whom he studied in film school. Beyond found footage and interviews, the documentary includes an attempted reconstruction of the events of October 7, when the previously peaceful kibbutz Nir Oz came under armed attack. We hear only the sounds — gunfire, threats, the cries of David’s daughters — but the audio testimony speaks for itself.
And yet A Letter to David ends on a note of hope — and life, it seems, has provided that hope with a real conclusion. On October 13, 2025, David Cunio was freed from captivity along with 20 other hostages. Tom Shoval now plans to re-edit the ending of A Letter to David.
