Barry Avrich and Noam Tibon attend the premiere of “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue” during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10 in Toronto.Shawn Goldberg/Getty Images
In the last moments of Barry Avrich’s new documentary, The Road Between Us, one of his subjects finally addresses the elephant in the room.
Gali Mir-Tibon is the wife of retired Israeli Major-General Noam Tibon and on Oct. 7, 2023, she helped her husband save their son and his family from Hamas, performing the dramatic rescue the film retells. In the end, noting the failure of the Israeli Defense Forces to protect citizens, she says that Israel was humiliated that day, and she suggests that the ensuing war “has an aspect of revenge.”
That’s a rare glimpse at the larger picture. Otherwise, The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue focuses narrowly on the Tibons’ story. At 7 a.m. on Oct. 7, Amir Tibon, a journalist; his wife, Miri, a social worker; and their two young daughters were in their home on the Nahal Oz kibbutz, an oasis of tidy houses, clean streets and green fields within sight of Gaza’s teeming tenements. First they heard mortars, then gunshots and, as they quickly retreated to their safe room, they realized that armed Hamas militants were outside their door.
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As the Hamas gunmen went house to house on the kibbutz, shooting anyone they found, Amir texted his father, known in the family as “911″ for his ability to solve every problem. The elder Tibons got in their car almost immediately and started the 85-kilometre drive from their home in Tel Aviv. She drove, and fast, so that he could hold his pistol. They expected to encounter IDF soldiers along the way; instead, the roads were empty.
Gali left the trip partway to drive a wounded soldier to hospital. In the end, it took Noam about 10 hours to reach Nahal Oz, by which time he had found some soldiers to team up with. Without his determination and knowledge of the kibbutz, it seems unlikely the small force would have succeeded in driving out the remaining gunmen and rescuing the Tibon family and others stuck in their safe rooms.
On the surface, this compelling minute-by-minute account, with Noam Tibon restaging the drive south and lying on the ground to show how he checked the pulse of a soldier before taking the dead man’s rifle, is a heroic tale of a father who will risk his life to save his family. Tibon’s preschool-aged granddaughters are kept quiet in the safe room with the promise that grandpa is coming, before finally being reunited in his arms.
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Meanwhile, the footage of random killing that was recorded by Hamas body cams and streamed to the Internet is horrific.
In the midst of this drama, one larger theme that does emerge is the misplaced faith of the kibbutz residents (and Israelis in general) in the military. A butterfly, they are told, could not penetrate the fences that separate them from Gaza. But Hamas did penetrate them, and the IDF took all day to show up. “Where is the army?” they repeatedly ask.
Some people may embrace this tale of heroism — presumably that is why it won the People’s Choice Award for documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. Others may refuse to see the film on the grounds that a sympathetic portrait of an Israeli general is a wisp of whitewash on the current killing in Gaza. But the film can be successfully viewed by a skeptical person appalled by both Oct. 7 and Israel’s retaliation.
None of the people in the film, to judge from their interviews, are fundamentalists, nor extremists. Still, they never question why they need safe rooms in their houses. They describe “terrorists” the same way you might describe an earthquake, as though such acts of violence do not involve a political element their government could better manage.
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Avrich was probably wise to avoid lengthy digressions into Middle East politics, but if a great film takes the particular and makes it universal, this is not a great film. Given the war that has followed, this individual story must remain only that, circumscribed by the larger context that perforce it can barely acknowledge.
At the end, Amir Tibon says three things: He expected the hostages to be released by now; he wants people to know his story so that Oct. 7 can’t be forgotten or minimized; and he feels that Israel has to make fundamental changes.
