‘From Ground Zero’: Review

Dirs. Reema Mahmoud, Muhammad al-Sharif et al. Palestine/France/Qatar/Jordan 2024. 113mins

A 21-film anthology on everyday life under bombing in Gaza, From Ground Zero offers a vivid range of insights into the daily challenges faced by civilians, particularly valuable given the restrictions on news reporting there. Now shortlisted for the Academy Awards, it is the latest example of a sub-genre that has boomed over the last decade, notably in the Middle East – the ‘insider testimony’ feature in which people living in conflict zones record their own experience outside the formal restrictions of standard documentary and news coverage conventions. For Sama, Mediha and No Other Land are recent notable examples.

A hugely revealing watch but not an easy one

Collating 21 vignettes of varying lengths, some as short as two minutes, this is a hugely revealing watch but not an easy one. This is partly because of the bleakness of the insights yielded, partly because of a degree of repetition in the material. As its correspondents all cover different aspects of the same brutally restrictive living conditions much of the content is harrowing, with its images of crowded camps and destroyed buildings, with people, living or dead, trapped under the debris. Nevertheless, there is enough variety and nuance here to sustain a sobering yet often hopeful panorama. 

Subtitled ‘The Untold Stories From Gaza’, the film was initiated by director Rashid Masharawi (Palestine Stereo) who is credited as ‘project supervisor’. Many of the contributors are experienced film and video makers; others come from fields including theatre, dance and puppetry. There is frequent emphasis on the power of art to help communities and individuals survive unthinkable conditions – not least for young people, as in ‘Soft Skin’, directed by Khamis Masharawi, showing an animation workshop in which children at a camp represent their own experiences through stop motion.  

Some of the pieces are strictly documentary, others essentially fiction – although, in their precise focus on living conditions, the fictions too are essentially factual in nature. Setting a very personal note, Reema Mahmoud’s opening ‘Selfies’ shows the director writing a letter – sent into the world literally as a message in a bottle – on a community facing deprivation, disease and hunger. In a similar register of lament are Nida’a Abu Hassnah’s ‘Out of Frame’, in which a young painter contemplates a career that has been derailed, and Ahmed Hassouna’s ‘Sorry Cinema’, with the director burning his clapperboard for firewood. Even more poignant is Aws Al Banna’s very personal ‘Jad and Nathalie’, in which death destroys a young couple’s hopes.

Other films strike more upbeat notes, even if under such conditions they may seem forced – notably Hana Wajeeh Eleiwa’s ‘No’, with musicians singing a song of hope. For others, it is a matter of pulling hope out of desperation, sometimes with a bitter, ironic edge: in Nidal Damo’s ‘Everything is Fine’, for example, a stand-up comic finds that the venue for his latest gig has been destroyed, and instead performs at a camp.

The sharpest, wittiest piece here is ‘Heaven’s Hell’, a mordant musing on the proximity of life and death in Gaza, as director and star Karim Satoum wakes up in a body bag and wonders how he got there. 

While some films take an impressionistic look at a lost past, the best make a virtue of concision and simplicity – like ‘Recycling’, Rabab Khamis’s crisp illustration of the rarity of water in Gaza’s camps. Tamer Nijim’s ‘The Teacher’ is an elegantly shot, quietly vivid account of one man’s day as he searches for food and water, and tries to overcome the challenge of recharging his phone. And Mustafa Kolab’s succinct ‘Echo’ is a minimalist illustration of the proverbial ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, playing a phone call from the depths of emergency over a single image of a man gazing at the sea. (Gaza’s shore features frequently as a symbol of hope and freedom.)

Surprisingly what features markedly little here is a sense of rage, or a focus on a precise political context. Surprisingly, the word ‘Israel’ never occurs, nor do people express specific anger. This may well be an editorial choice on the part of selection committee, to make the film as accessible as possible to a wider public. There are some direct references nonetheless: in Mustafa Al-Nabih’s ‘Offerings’, writer Diana El Shinawy talks about a long history of displacements, while Alaa Islam Ayoub’s ‘Overburden’ makes reference to a novel about the displacements of 1948, noting that for refugees hoping to retain some of their possessions, books are heavy to carry, but oppression is heavier.