Following the start of the current war between Hamas and Israel, the more than two million Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip have been trying to survive and maintain dignity and hope against all odds. This is what the beautiful, heart-rending short films contained in “From Ground Zero”, shortlisted as the Palestinian entry for Best International Film at the 2025 Oscars, make clear.
The documentary is spearheaded and produced by filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, who established the Masharawi Film Fund to nurture such projects and give Palestinians a voice. “From Ground Zero” is a two-part omnibus film offering 22 shorts directed by 22 different Palestinian directors who have been surviving through destruction and death since October 2023. Most of these shorts, which last between three and six minutes each, can be described as documentaries, although some of them are also fictions and others span the gap between the two. Still others rely on animation and puppeteering as low-cost and whimsical means of telling stories about the plight of Gazans.
Each director brings his or her own sensitivity to their stories, resulting in a wide variety of viewpoints, styles and tones. Many of them are unsurprisingly tragic, like the harrowing “No Signal” by Mohammad Al Sharif, a single tracking shot of a man desperately digging with his bare hands through the rubble of his former house to locate his brother. Or like “24 Hours”, in which Mosab tells of how he was targeted three times by aerial bombings in the space of 24 hours. Twice, he found himself buried under the rubble of houses, each time being pulled out by rescue teams, as archival footage shows on screen. And each time, more members of his family were wiped out, leaving him desperately alone.
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At other times, a lighter tone is maintained, even in the midst of the unfolding tragedy. In “Everything is Fine”, by Nidal Damo, a standup comedian insists on performing his act, no matter what. But first, he needs to take a shower, an adventure in itself in a territory where water is tightly rationed. Finding and managing water and other vital resources is a recurring theme, as in “Recycling”, by Rabab Khamis, or “The Teacher”, by Tamer Nijim. The latter is a perfect example of simple storytelling employed to great effect: an ageing teacher wanders the derelict streets of Gaza in search of food, water and a power outlet to recharge his phone – a crucial tool to maintain contact with loved ones, as dramatically shown in many of the shorts.
The quest for hope and light is dramatized most strikingly in the beautiful “No”, in which director Hana Eleiwa is seen on camera refusing stories of distress and death. Instead, she wants to prioritize, for once, hope and resilience, offering a short full of singing and dancing among the searing ruins. In conclusion, women pledge to say, “no to oppression, to everything that contradicts human rights, joy, life, our smiles, our children’s smiles, no to everything that destroys our hopes”. Coming towards the end of the film, “No” is an ode to the human spirit, where hope can emerge even from the slaughterhouse that Gaza is today.
Women in fact offer some of the most affecting segments. The opening story, “Selfies”, is, like many of the other shorts, a first-person diary-like entry by a woman, filmmaker Reema Mahmoud, who visits the ruins of her house and reflects on the death of her family members. She also shares how she misses her femininity, watching some of her old videos on TikTok as though looking at a version of herself from a parallel reality. In the poetically inclined “Overburden”, by Ala’a Islam Ayoub, a woman reflects on how she had to leave her heavy books behind to flee warfare. Yet, she asks, “What is heavier than oppression?”, hinting at how she still carries around the heaviest of burdens with her.
The place and role of art and entertainment are issues that are regularly raised by the directors. Besides standup comedy and literature, the role of cinema itself is questioned in the beautiful, gripping “Sorry Cinema”, another first-person account by Ahmed Hassouna. The director explains how filmmaking must give way to simple surviving as he films himself and hundreds of others running or cycling furiously towards delivery crates being airdropped by humanitarian airplanes. The last scene is one of the most affecting in the anthology film.
In “Out of Frame”, contemporary artist Ranin Al Zeriei visits yet another ruined house, in which she finds the remnants of her artworks and her past hopes for international recognition. In the last shot, she symbolically sweeps away the dust covering one of them, bringing back to the light her art and the hope it conveys. This shot is one of many which aptly summarize the spirit of human fortitude that pervades the many stories, far from any sort of melodramatic miserabilism.
Visually, the shorts unsurprisingly offer dystopian visions of Gaza, whose eviscerated buildings and debris strewn streets provide the backdrop for most of the segments. Only the beach provides from time to time visual respite away from urban desolation – except in the gut-wrenching “Echo” by Mustafa Kulab, which contrasts a single peaceful shot of the beach with a soundtrack full of the screams of people being heard running away from gunshots and explosions. Aurally, from the very first image, the incessant buzz of drones ominously circling the skies over Gaza provides the officious soundtrack of the documentary, forever reminding you that death can strike at any instant.
Finally, children are, most tragically, a constant presence throughout the film. Trauma is predictably one of the main themes, but dealing with the trauma of children, as in “Farah and Myriam” by Wesham Moussa, is particularly poignant: “I am exhausted, I went through difficult days. I can’t go on living this way. We are so tired”, a teen says. Yet here again, the shorts manage to balance pathos with faith in the brighter future symbolized by children.
On the one hand, nothing can be more harrowing than the story (in Khanis Masharawi‘s “Soft Skin”) of children whose mothers have written their names on their arms and legs in case they are killed in a bombardment and their limbs are blown apart. Yet on the other hand, these same children are seen learning stop-motion animation to tell their story and help them process the trauma of war (how can you sleep at night?). This, which returns to the theme of art and its place during wartime, has to be one of the highlights of the anthology.
Finally, the last word is for “Awakening”, by Mahdi Kreirah and the whole Kreirah family, who perform their own puppet show for the camera, with puppets made out of trash (and are Palestinians really treated as anything other than trash?). This is a performance by a family and about the family, a Palestinian one who cannot forget the past wars or the current one, what happened and when. “From Ground Zero”, after all, is not simply a story of universal resilience, but a resilience of a decidedly Palestinian kind, and for the first time the word “Nakba” is heard, referring to the violence against and mass displacement of Palestinians to the open air prison that Gaza has been since 1948. This does not mean that “From Ground Zero” suddenly becomes political; rather, that suffering and death, along with resilience and hope, have been part of the Palestinian experience for a long time indeed. Something that Gazan children – those who make it through the war – will clearly not forget in a long while.