October 8: ‘This is a fight for the west, for the free world, for democracy’

It was a photo of college student Tessa Veksler than stopped filmmaker Wendy Sachs in her tracks as she scrolled through Instagram. Tessa – looking like any other fresh-faced, sweats-wearing student, save the silver Star of David around her neck - standing in front of UC Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center where a handmade “Zionists Not Allowed” was plastered to its glass door.

The irony of it: the multicultural centre. Sachs had already begun interviewing other students for what would become her documentary October 8, when suddenly she knew it had to include Veksler. “When I saw that [post], honestly, I felt gutted, my heart stopped. I stopped cold.

“For a Jewish person of a certain age, when we see [a sign like] that, it means ‘No Jew Allowed.’ I said, ‘I need to find her, I need to interview her, and I started stalking her on Instagram – I slid into her DMs, as the kids say.”

Veksler’s onscreen testimony – in which she relays the extent to which she was bullied and harassed on campus, only barely winning a vote against recalling her position as president of the student body at UCSB – is the heartbeat of October 8. At the Melbourne preview screening last month as a guest of the Dor Foundation – whose mission it is to combat antisemitism in Australia - Veksler received a lengthy standing ovation.

The movie, which opens this Thursday in Sydney and Melbourne, aims not to revisit the October 7 massacre, but instead uses the way that American universities became so divided over the war as a prompt to explain how the world arrived at the levels of antisemitism and hatred that we see today.