A film director burns his lamination for warmth. A teacher works to feed his students. A stand-up comedian arrives at the party to find the place bombed. In From Ground Zero, Palestine’s entry for the Academy Awards’ Feature Film category, 22 directors present cinematic memoirs from Gaza, shot between (and sometimes during) Israeli army raids to weave a picture of life under siege. Each short film is unique in its concept, however, linked by a shared resilience, and a need to document the violent interruption of life and routine.
Disappointed from the Cannes lineup back in May For political reasonsSelections were displayed Just outside the festival As an act of protest: a fitting premiere of defiant creative work in the face of genocide. “From Ground Zero,” curated and financed by director Rachid Masharawi, brings dozens of emerging artists to the forefront, presenting digital flashbacks and memoirs about modern life in the Gaza Strip. The duration of shorts ranges from a few minutes to approximately ten minutes. Some are charming and sad, like Rima Mahmoud’s inaugural documentary “Portraits,” about a young woman who uses makeup to hide her stresses and retain a sense of femininity as the world crumbles around her. Others, such as Mohamed El Sherif’s film No Signal – which immediately follows Selfies – use the rubble of collapsed buildings to depict intensely fictional scenes inspired by reality.
None of these stories or approaches seem at odds with each other, or with the project as a whole. In fact, their diversity is the point, as each one depicts a different facet of social and personal life in the sinister new realities of their creators, whether they deal with death in the abstract – as in Kerem Stom’s absurd “Hell’s Paradise,” in which a man sleeps… In a body bag for comfort – or with grief as his new normal. Surprisingly, only one of the films in the collection remains unfinished, its director appearing on screen to detail her original plans before her loved ones were murdered in a way that made her project too painful to handle.
While most of the footage is contemporary, a number of the short films feature brief flashbacks or overlaid images of life before the war between Israel and Hamas began, imbuing the project with a palpable sense of loss – the social lives of people and their loved ones. that. Yet “From Ground Zero,” among the many cuts in black between each short, contains a sense of history. The artists may have been exposed to harsh new extremes, but their sense of closure, and their familiarity with war, go back years – if not decades – a theme poetically presented in Mehdi Qorira’s haunting concluding chapter, “The Awakening,” which he narrates with puppets. Made from scraps.
The craftsmanship of the filmmaking on display is undoubtedly impressive, but it’s also self-reflective, between the digital lo-fi quality of most of the shorts and the sense that the very fabric of the film is also a commentary. The digital world has been a smoke signal for Palestine amid the ongoing atrocities. Many snippets of Gaza’s ordeal have made their way onto social media (one in particular, of a man being rescued from the rubble of his home, is the subject of one story in the film), but few of these fleeting clips have made such an impact. An in-depth look at the lives of the citizens of Gaza. The psychological impact of their ordeal becomes detailed and clear, as does their hope in the face of doom.
Their stories and their essence live within these pixels the way the Holocaust was captured on celluloid. The images of the latter that are most popular with the public were taken either by perpetrators or editors. “From Ground Zero” exists more in the tradition of photographers Henrik Ros and Mendel Grossman, residents of Poland’s ghettoes, who not only documented everyday life with their cameras, but imbued it with a familiar, vivid humanity. In this context, it’s hard to ignore how From Scratch feels like history is unfolding, and tragedy is being commemorated, right before our eyes.