'Silence is louder than any scream': How a film about Israelis protesting the Gaza war made it to the Oscars

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Mar 13, 2026

Hila Medalia, an Israeli documentary filmmaker and producer, discusses her Oscar-nominated short about Israelis staging a silent vigil for Palestinian children. She talks about filming quickly during wartime. She describes the vigil’s origins, the power of silence amid loud protests, hostile public reactions, its spread abroad, and how the nomination changed the film’s reach.

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INSIGHT

Fast Track Filmmaking Amplified a Wartime Message

Rapid filmmaking can amplify urgent civic messages during wartime.
Hila Medalia filmed weekly starting June and released in LA by September to share the vigil quickly rather than waiting festival circuits.

ADVICE

Publish Urgent Stories Immediately

Act quickly when an urgent story needs public attention; prioritize timely release over festival runs.
Medalia assembled, edited, and released the film within months to ensure Israeli and global audiences saw the vigil fast.

ANECDOTE

How A Silent Vigil Grew From Homemade Posters

A spontaneous, women-led vigil began with activists printing home photos after 139 children were killed in one day.
It grew from a handful to over 1,000 people, each holding a photo with name, age, origin and date of death, standing silently.

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Under the shadow of the Gaza war, even before the current conflict with Iran, Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia found it “very surprising” that her short film “Children No More: Were and Are Gone” was nominated for an Academy Award – but she was thrilled.

Despite the atmosphere in Hollywood even before the U.S.-Israel military attack in Iran, with petitions to boycott Israeli filmmakers circulated, two Israelis are nominated to take home golden statues at the March 16 ceremony: Medalia's film, in the category of Best Documentary Short, along with Meyer Levinson-Blount’s “Butcher’s Stain,” which is nominated for Best Live Action Short Film.

The nominations are “an incredible achievement of course for both Meyer and I, but also for the entire Israeli film community,” she said, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast.

Medalia’s film follows a group of Israeli activists who in March 2025, after the second cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed, learned that 139 Palestinian children had been killed in a single day by IDF attacks in Gaza.

The small group decided to print out photographs of the children, and stand holding the images silently as an accompaniment to the raucous demonstrations taking place in Tel Aviv calling for a cease-fire that would bring back the Israeli hostages.

Over time their action, Medalia explained, “slowly grew into this bigger vigil that had more than 1,000 people. On each poster there is a picture of a child, their name, their age, where they're from, the day that they were killed. That's it. No political slogans. And they stood in silence.”

She was inspired and impressed by the group’s commitment to remaining silent – even as passersby insulted and cursed them.

Unlike the other films Medalia is competing against, “Children No More” did not make the rounds of the prestigious film festivals to increase its Oscar chances – its path from conception to filming to release was unusually rapid.

“We felt that we could not wait to share with the local Israeli audience and the world.”

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