Thursday, February 13, 2025

Movie Review: ‘From Ground Zero’ Collects Necessary Stories From Gaza


Director: Aws Al-Banna, Ahmed Al-Danf, Basil Al-Maqousi
Stars: Aws Al-Banna, Kenzi Al Balbisi, Mohammed Kamel

Synopsis: From Ground Zero is a collection of 22 short films made in Gaza. Initiated by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, the project was born to give a voice to 22 Gazan filmmakers to tell the untold stories of the current war on film.


A young boy packs his schoolwork everyday and walks from his displaced persons tent to the grave of his schoolteacher buried in rubble to study. A woman sends a letter in a plastic bottle across the ocean with a digital record of her life in Gaza. A man retraces his steps to recall why he awoke inside a body bag. A child explains that the only two recognizable sounds her little brother utters are, “Papa and the siren of an ambulance.” An adolescent girl keeps her headphones on to block out the sound of drones and the flashbacks to when she almost died when her family home was bombed. A young man relates that his fiancée is dead and with her the names for the potential child they planned to have. This is but a glimpse of the twenty-two powerful short films included in From Ground Zero which is Palestine’s entry into the Academy Awards.

Collected and produced by Rashid Masharawi, the shorts in From Ground Zero reflect the experiences of amateur and professional filmmakers in war torn Gaza. Some are documentary styled, others are experimental, others fictional but nevertheless viscerally real. The sounds of drones and aircraft are so prevalent in most of the shorts it is almost shocking when a film does not have them in the soundscape. In Hana Eleiwa’s No a journalist seeks to replace the sound of war with music. The music is her way of repudiating war (Hana says “I reject October 7th”) and hopelessness, bringing to the fore the creative and community spirit of the Palestinian people.

Art, dance, and music represent some of the cultural touchstones of the Palestinian people both in a historical and contemporary framework. They are also ways of coping with, and expressing, trauma. Nidal Damo’s All is Fine follows a standup comedian as he dresses in his performance suit and goes to a theater where he was doing a routine. The theater was destroyed in an air assault. Making people laugh is what the comic hoped to do, but can people laugh in a time of ongoing tragedy? He decides they must and performs for others in the refugee camp. Bashar Al Balbisi’s Charm is an abstract dance piece wherein a young girl imagines her past and future on the shores of Gaza overlooking a mystical and mythological dancing sea goddess with voices chanting. Sorry Cinema by Ahmed Hassouna shows the work the professional director was doing before the IDF bombs and fighters crippled Gaza, and how he now feels all he can do with his camera is document the reality – the notion of fictional worlds being out of his reach. A promising visual artist in Out of Frame by Neda’a Abu Hasna visits her mostly destroyed studio examining what is left of her work. She holds her detritus covered prize-winning sculptures of doves and expresses they were meant to be symbols of peace, but now there is no peace. Her photographs of Gaza are memories of an area that no longer exists. Her art is already memory box documents.

Two of the most powerful short films using art are Awakening by puppeteer Mahdi Kreirah and Soft Skin by children’s animation teacher Khamis Masharawi. Both shorts allow children to create the scripts and, in the case of Soft Skin, the children voice and create the animation. Awakening revolves around a family where the father regains full consciousness after an injury in the 2014 struggles. As his family relates what is happening now, he cannot fathom whether he is in the past or the future – either way, they all wish for the blissful state of living without memories.  

Soft Skin brings together a group of young children who draw and animate their understanding of what is happening around them. The soft skin referred to is their own. Parents write the names of the children on their arms or legs so they might be identified if they are caught in a bombing. In the animation, the writing on the skin brings bad dreams, an awareness that they are targets and their names could bring the bombs to them. Each child builds the story and animation with Khamis Masharawi documenting the process and assisting in bringing the final product to be viewed by the children and the audience.

Dignity and humanity within a traumatized and exhausted community is the core tenet of most of the shorts. Some are melancholy, such as School Day where a young boy packs his exercise book in his refugee tent and walks across Gaza to sit in the rubble of what was once his primary school to study in front of the hastily marked ‘grave’ of his schoolteacher. Other shorts speak to the urgent panic of the daily devastation. In No Signal, a man searches for his brother who he thinks could still be alive under the rubble. The buried man’s daughter thinks she heard him answer the cell phone call, but with communications being lost there is no way to be sure, and calling the emergency services is pointless. Wissam Moussa’s Farah and Myriam consists of two teenagers relating their terror and the loss of their homes, safety, and family. “I’m afraid of the night…” “The noise of the rockets is unbearable…” “Our mental health is ruined.” 

Creating art in a warzone is an act of bravery and a herald for audiences to bear witness to the struggles of everyday people trying to survive in extreme circumstances. Etimad Washah, the director of the unfinished short Taxi Wanissa, about a man and his donkey cart taxi, stops making the film because her brother was killed in a bombing. The unfinished work is her statement. It is near impossible not to wonder how many of the people appearing in the shorts, in the background of the work, or areas filmed are gone since the work was made. Are the children of Soft Skin safe? From Ground Zero may be the only surviving record of the very existence of the faces and voices seen.

From Ground Zero is not a piece of propaganda. It is not what is termed ‘incendiary’ filmmaking. It is the opposite. In some ways it is summarized by the first short, Reema Mahmoud’s Selfie, in which a woman films her days creating a digital record of her life in the camps. How every day she puts on makeup to cover her exhaustion and goes out to find food for her children, or visits what is left of her house with her cat who refuses to leave. Around her people are dying of disease and starvation. Her sister’s house is bombed and only her niece survives. She places a letter and a sim card in a plastic bottle and lets the sea take it. The letter reads; “Dear unknown friend, I don’t know if you’ll read this letter… but I want you to know I had a beautiful life and a beautiful city.”

From Ground Zero is a cinematic letter in a bottle hoping to reach shores of empathy after being caught in the tides of ceaseless conflict. To watch the film and embrace its humanity is to be a part of the safe harbor for desperate people. One should not look away.

Grade: A

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