Eli Katzoff was 17 years old when he first visited Israel on a school exchange program. The Second Intifada was at its height, and Katzoff’s main impression of that time was watching various cultures and ethnicities colliding and complementing each other. In a recent interview with JewishBoston, Katzoff noted that it was his first introduction to the complexities that distinguish Israel.
Prior to his latest return to Israel five years ago, Katzoff was in a serious automobile accident that he said changed his life’s trajectory. A few months later, he traveled to Israel, and within two years made a name for himself in the country with mission-driven video journalism.
In Israel, he cultivated storytelling skills to make affecting and impactful videos about the country. Describing his creative process, he says, “Being a good storyteller means you have to experiment, and that means failing and breaking rules that eventually teach you how to be great at what you do. As a filmmaker, it’s my job to look at societies and places, and tell stories underscoring that there are no easy answers.”
Katzoff’s unique slant on a subject originates with the question he asks himself each time he shoots a new documentary: “How can I tell this story in a way that everyone else is not telling it?” One of those answers came to him in the early aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Katzoff was on site at Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the two kibbutzim Hamas rampaged. He cites how reporters pointed out signs of the massacre in places like bomb shelters with blood-stained walls where occupants were murdered. But he wanted to humanize the victims of Hamas’s massacre at Nir Oz.
He found a way to do that when he came upon Nir Oz’s devastating group chat in real time on the morning of Oct. 7. In his video “The House Is Burning,” Katzoff records residents’ texts “telling each other where to go, where to hide. They were figuring out where Hamas was. When I read that chat, I truly read the horrible story of what happened that day.”
To illuminate those texts, he filmed shots of Nir Oz starting outside and slowly moving inside buildings that reflected murderous destruction. “The interesting thing visually about Nir Oz is that its outside is as beautiful as a botanical garden,” Katzoff recalls. “It’s only when you walk inside of a house that you can see the shattered glass and the bloodstains in a bedroom. And then there are a few houses that are burnt husks. But much of the kibbutz is somewhat intact.”
He allows the images to tell the story while the film’s narrative is amplified through the text chain. “I started putting the chat in small text bubbles in real time as we moved around Nir Oz, and the visuals gradually depicted more of the inside,” he says. The film stirs up difficult emotions for Katzoff. “I can barely watch this film,” he adds. “When you read these texts from the chain, you really begin to understand the horror of what happened.”
These days war is within and surrounding Israel like never before. Once again, Katzoff is capturing that complexity in a series of short documentaries, one of which—“Bomb Shelters Make Good Neighbors”—recently won the American Jewish Press Association’s Marc Klein Award for Excellence for Best Use of Interactive Media. Like many of his documentaries, Katzoff tells his stories with a perspective that makes art out of life’s profound dailiness.
“Bomb Shelters” was filmed the day after Iran’s historic April 13, 2025, drone and missile attack—its first direct strike on Israel. Katzoff captured the incident by filming inside the various bomb shelters throughout the country.
In addition to a mamad, a room in a house or apartment building that functions as a bomb shelter, he filmed concrete bomb shelters in the south of the country, decorated with murals by various artists. On Oct. 7, terrorists threw grenades into those shelters, killing hundreds of people. There was playground equipment, such as a whimsical yet concrete caterpillar, standing in as a bomb shelter. The relatively new Jerusalem and Tel Aviv light rails doubled as bomb shelters after Iran’s attack.
In subsequent documentaries, Katzoff uses camera drones to film in unprecedented and powerful ways. In “Aftermath: Flight Through One Iranian Missile Strike,” he flew a drone into apartment buildings in Tel Aviv destroyed by the missiles. In his written synopsis of the film, Katzoff explained “that while most drone photography is about flying over and near landscapes, the purpose of this drone was to fly through the insides of the apartments ripped apart by the blast. To do this, I used the same search-and-rescue drone that paramedics and first responders use to find survivors after a rocket strike.”
Katzoff was also the only journalist who used a drone to great effect, filming in “Kibbutz Be’eri, Through the Ruins,” the second kibbutz Hamas brutally attacked on Oct. 7. He flew the drone through destroyed houses with the intention to “create a ghost-like effect where the viewer feels like they’re moving through it. There are no voices. There is no commentary. It’s purely visual, and like Kibbutz Nir Oz, I wanted to show how large Be’eri is,” he says.
Katzoff’s passion for visually telling stories continues in a new project called “Through the Land: Filmed in Motion. Rooted in Place.” Among the things he hopes for is that it presents “a podcast [that] meets visual storytelling: no studio, no scripts, just expert insights unfolding across landscapes that matter.”
In “Through the Land,” Katzoff continues to ask himself how he can tell original stories about Israel’s complexities.