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TEL AVIV, Israel - A trio of filmmakers set out this month to show a slice of normalcy by making a film about their favorite Tel Aviv pub and its jam sessions.
Early Wednesday, as they filmed at Mike's Place, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance, killing two musicians and a waitress who was to be the film's central character.
The bomber had a British passport, the first time in 89 such bombings that a foreigner has carried out a suicide attack. The bar, near the U.S. Embassy, caters to foreigners.
One of the filmmakers, Jack Baxter, 49, from New York, suffered burns to his arms and remains in the intensive-care unit of a Tel Aviv hospital. The other two documentarymakers were left shocked, trying to figure out how to complete their project.
"It isn't safe. It isn't safe," the film's American-born director, Joshua Faudem, 27, said about life in Israel. "We'd like to believe that it is safe, and that's what we wanted to show."
Baxter had recruited Faudem, who was born in Detroit and immigrated to Israel, and his girlfriend Pavla Fleischer, 27, from Prague, Czech Republic, to make a film about the pub and its mix of travelers and locals seeking escape from the region's troubles.
Several other bombings close to both of the bar's Tel Aviv and Jerusalem locations haven't stopped the music or the beer.
"What you see in the news, it gives you the idea that it's hell here in Israel," said Fleischer. "We wanted to show there's life outside that. People are going out, playing music."
The waitress, Dominique Hess, 29, said in an interview for the film that she studied philosophy in Paris before coming to Israel five years ago at the suggestion of a friend. She wound up moving.
She talked about the violence - recalling how on June 1, 2001, a suicide bomber killed 21 young people outside of a seaside disco just a 21/2-minute walk from her house. She was close enough to hear another bomb at a coffee shop.
Just after midnight Wednesday, Fleischer was filming at the pub when the bomber blew himself up after arguing with a security guard who blocked his entrance, preventing a far greater tragedy.
The guard, Avi Taviv, also one of the film's characters, was severely wounded. The waitress died later at the hospital.
Mike's Place is to reopen next week, between the somber Israeli Memorial Day and joyous Independence Day celebrations. The bar plans a memorial, and then a party. That sort of contrast between grief and rebirth is now the kernel of the film, Faudem said.
"That's the Israeli approach," he said. "You fall down and you get back up."