Saved by the Ball

"The men of Kfar Aza's football team grew up on the same pitch. On October 7 they lost friends, homes and three of their own. They had no idea how to go on. So they turned to the only way any of them knew how to survive it: playing football together."

The players of Kfar Aza's amateur football team have known each other their whole lives. On October 7, 2023, that world ended in a single morning — more than sixty people from the kibbutz were murdered, nineteen taken hostage into Gaza, and among the dead and missing were their teammates, neighbors, and families. Weeks later, the players were asked a question none of them knew how to answer: does the team play this season? Filmed over two and a half years, Saved by the Ball stays in the moments football makes room for and grief doesn't. Not a film about a war, and not a film about football — a film about what men do for each other when words are useless, and how a body in motion can start to heal what the mind cannot yet face.