“Torn,” a documentary about the hostage poster campaign that spread across New York City streets after the October 7 massacre, won a New York Emmy Award in the cultural documentary category. The film was directed by Nimrod Shapira, who thanked the academy for the honor: “I made this film after watching posters of kidnapped hostages being torn down across New York, my city. As the paper was torn, so was the social fabric of the city I call home. But this is not really a film about posters—it’s about freedom of speech, cancel culture, the echo chambers we’ve built around ourselves and what happens when we’d silence people rather than listen to them.”
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The film was shot during the first three months of the war and features interviews with ten New York residents. It examines how the poster campaign became a battleground between competing narratives, focusing on the confrontations that developed around putting up and tearing down the hostage posters on New York streets. Shapira said his goal was to document not just the tearing of the posters themselves, but also “the tearing of the city’s social fabric.”
The award won by the Israeli director’s film was presented at the 69th annual ceremony of the New York chapter, held by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). The awards recognize outstanding achievements in television and media in the New York metropolitan area, which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut as well as all of New York State.
According to the official website, the awards are designed “to serve as an incentive for continued pursuit of excellence for those working in the television and digital media industry, and to focus public attention on outstanding cultural, educational, technological, entertainment, news, informational programming and artistic achievements in television and on the internet.”