Read an extract from Jocelyn Hurdnall's book Defy the Stars

Although Jocelyn and Anthony Hurndall had been divorced for several years, on April 12, 2003, they boarded a plane to Israel together. All they had been told was that their eldest son, Tom, had been shot in Gaza and was in a coma. Nine months later, he would die.

In that time, the Hurndalls mounted a campaign to establish what had happened and who was responsible. Anthony, a lawyer with the stiffest of upper lips, responded to the trauma by reverting to type, amassing affidavits for his own detailed investigation. He submitted his work to the Israeli army (IDF) and, after months of obfuscation on its part, his report led to the jailing of Sergeant Taysir Hayb, an Israeli sniper, for manslaughter. It is also the basis of The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, a Channel 4 film to be broadcast this month.

Tom Hurndall was a 21-year-old aspiring photojournalist who took himself off to Gaza because, in Jocelyn’s words, “he wanted to see what was going on with his own eyes”. One way to get into Gaza with a camera was to join the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-founded organisation that places international volunteers in nonviolent protests against the Israeli military in Gaza and the West Bank. The passports of internationals are meant to provide protection for the Palestinians around them. So it was that, on April 11, Hurndall was taking pictures during a march intended to blockade Israeli tanks. Warning shots were fired from an Israeli watchtower to break up the crowd. The protesters took cover, but some children were left stranded. Hurndall went back once, then twice, to carry them to safety, and was hit in the head by a single shot.

These facts form the framework for the film. In portraying what happened to Hurndall, it is as forensically accurate as it can be. “We’ve taken Anthony’s report,” says the director, Rowan Joffé. “Every aspect of the demonstration, of the shooting, of the number of rounds that were fired, has been checked, counterchecked and cross-referenced with him.”

The shooting, however, is only the beginning of the drama — it takes place during the opening sequences and acts as a slingshot for what follows. In spite of the title, it is clear that the shooting is just one of several interests for the film-makers. The film juxtaposes Anthony and Jocelyn’s campaign for justice with the story of the 21-year-old Israeli sniper who shot their son. It attempts to show how an Arab-Israeli soldier (Taysir is a Bedouin) could be employed to fire on Palestinians and, ultimately, kill an unarmed man. At its emotional core is a very modern family relationship: divorced parents trying to put differences aside to hold their family together.

It is the latter elements that turn a potentially dry retelling into a textured, immensely affecting drama. These same elements, however, drape conjecture, extrapolation and interpretation over the literal truth, and it is here that real-life drama almost always runs into controversy. In this case, all of these issues are compounded by the fact that the main characters in this story, the Hurndalls, had an integral role in the making of the film, with some power of veto on the scripts. In this light, The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall starts to look like an object lesson in the strengths and weaknesses of a format that is increasingly dominant in factual television.

Real-life dramas inevitably have to leave material out. In this case, the role of Tom’s sister, Sophie, who took on the media campaign for justice after Anthony filed his report, is largely unmentioned. All of the Hurndalls say they would like to have seen more of their son and brother before his death, even as they recognise that this is a screenplay, not a tribute.

More contentious than the omissions are the insertions. The Hurndalls maintain that the growing intensity of their relationship, culminating in a scene that hints at a reconciliation, is dramatic licence. One scene in particular did not make the final cut because they insisted it be removed. In it, the sniper’s watchtower is itself countersniped, and Hayb’s army colleague is shot in the hand. The scene is meant to suggest the kind of pressures that were routine for put-upon IDF soldiers. When I spoke to Joffé on location in Jordan late last year, it was already causing some consternation.

“[Anthony Hurndall's] feeling is, ‘This didn’t happen.’ And our feeling is, ‘You don’t know this didn’t happen.’ Even if it’s not a fact, it’s certainly true to the extent that, if it didn’t happen to Taysir at this particular moment, it sums up life in a watchtower — indeed, the entire scene came from my looking at YouTube. We essentially mocked up countersniping that actually happened.”

The Hurndalls didn’t see it that way. “The scene in the tower gave a wrong impression of events,” Anthony says. “It didn’t happen, and there was some false research fed into the production team from outside, which, I’m afraid to say, using my usual investigative sense, we sort of blew out of the water.” He reminded the producers of a contract that, gimlet-eyed as ever, he had insisted on from the outset. The scene went.

In one sense, therefore, the broader goals of the film-makers have been trumped by a more dead-eyed forensic rigour. Yet this is part and parcel of the inevitable abrasive counterpoint of making real-life drama. Where documentable facts meet dramatic licence, those expecting a verbatim account can always find nits to pick. On the other hand, real-life drama can elicit emotional responses beyond the reach of documentary — one reason they are becoming increasingly popular.

“There is a view that a whole swathe of factual TV is dying, and the only way you can get people to engage with some of these bigger ideas and thoughts is through drama,” says Charles Furneaux, the film’s executive producer, who also produced the award-winning Touching the Void. Furneaux’s background is in documentaries, but with the success of Touching the Void, he finds himself at the vanguard of the factual producers’ march on television drama. “If you want ideas that engage with the outside world, get stories from people who understand that world. Factual producers are generating the best of those ideas. It’s really a case of how you keep within the genre of television the sorts of stories you mostly find written about in newspapers and magazines.”

The problem with this kind of hybridising is that dramatists strive for a different kind of truth from archivists. Real-life drama like The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall lies somewhere between the two. “The important thing is that, while it’s the Hurndalls’ story, it’s not their film,” Furneaux says. “There’s a distinction. On the one hand, one has to be respectful of the fact that it is their story, and of the appalling experience they have been through. But the film has a distance from them, I hope, which means it’s more rounded and takes a slightly different angle on what happened.”

In spite of the film’s sometimes fractious gestation, the Hurndalls are delighted with the end result.

“I think it is outstanding — the integrity of it shines out,” Jocelyn says. It is in part the memorial she and Anthony wanted for their son, in part a damning indictment of the IDF, but in the main a superb human drama that could have stood alone as a piece of fiction.

“There’s always that great distinction, in documentaries, between truthfulness and literalness,” Furneaux says. “It’s a great thing to hang on to, because, being literally true, you can be untrue.” He sees the dialogue between the Hurndalls and the film-makers as the family learning to understand the distinction. “We all create our own myth. The film is just another version.”

The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall is on Channel 4 on October 13 at 9pm

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