Seated among the ruins of a building in Gaza City, Aws Al-Banna. 28, speaks to the camera about Natalie, his fiancée. They had planned on getting married and starting a family, “sharing a future” and “continuing to make memories.” The rubble on which he sits was once the building she lived in. “The war took her away from me. It’s taken everything from me. She died with the rest of her family in a bombing,” says Al-Banna in a videocall from a refugee camp in Khan Yunis, in the southern region of the Gaza Strip.
His story, filmed at the start of 2024 using a mobile phone, is one of the 22 short films compiled by Gazan director Rashid Masharawi in the movie From Ground Zero, which made its official debut on January 3 and has been shortlisted for the Oscars’ Best International Film category, representing Palestine. The film has passed the preliminary round of voting and on January 17, its team will find out whether it made the final list of nominations. It is comprised of stories filmed by 22 directors in Gaza, from documentaries to fiction and animation, offering different viewpoints and experiences of the war that started on October 7, 2023 and has ended the lives of more than 45,500 people, according to numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry.
Al-Banna, who remembers the day of the bombing that took Natalie’s life as “a nightmare,” was a television and theater actor before the war began. He had a “flair for acting,” and was interested in the performing arts as a child; in 2015, after studying acting, he began filming his own productions. “I really like shooting love stories,” he confesses. “I’m quite romantic.” That’s partly why he wanted his one-man short film, entitled Jad and Natalie, to tell the story of himself and his fiancée. Producing it brought him out of the “period of deep depression” into which he entered after her death.
“I am one of the two million people who suffer in the Gaza Strip. The world needs to know that we have lives, families, love and dreams, like everyone else,” says Al-Banna. He refuses to leave because his “dream” of becoming an actor “hasn’t yet come true.” And he doesn’t want to fulfill it anywhere besides his home. When he arrived at Khan Yunis, convinced of the therapeutic powers of theater, he founded Child Smile, an organization that hosts theater workshops for children who have experienced war-related trauma. Its students use performing arts to tell their stories, transforming them into plays in order to express and work through their emotions. They eventually present the works to their parents and other children. “I do it because I need it as much as they do, to heal myself and help them to do the same,” he says.
Fighting back with “the peace of art”
Reema Mahmoud, 36, a filmmaker born in the West Bank who has lived for most of her life in Gaza, says that From Ground Zero “is not just a cinematographic project”. Her contribution to the film is her short Selfie, and she believes that film is “a way to fight with the peace of art” and to bring “to the Western and Arab world the image of what we experience every day: constant bombardment, total destruction and deprivation,” she explains from a refugee camp in Rafah, on the southern tip of the Strip.
In Selfie, which Mahmoud describes as “a message in a bottle” that she throws into the sea “for an unknown friend,” she tells of her experience being displaced by the war, condemned to live in refugee camps. It’s her story, but also that of thousands of other women. “We are especially vulnerable while being displaced: we have no privacy, not even basic sanitary supplies, clothes or food.” In the film, Mahmoud writes a letter in which she tells what the last year has been like for her, inserts it into a bottle and heaves it into the ocean. “I don’t know if it will get to anyone or not, but it’s my way of conveying my suffering.”
Mahmoud has been making movies for 15 years on the Strip, where she has produced 25 short films that focus on women’s experiences. Since childhood she has loved “classic films in black and white,” and though she studied communications and journalism at the University of Palestine in Gaza City, she was ultimately drawn to the seventh art. Her life has been marked by several conflicts, but none like the current war. “We live under constant bombardment, there is no safe place in Gaza. Our lives are always at risk,” she says. Still, she is certain that she wants to stay put: “It is the heart that beats in my body. My love for Gaza is similar to my love for my mother. I can’t live without them,” she says.
Our life is wasted between the need to document and the need to survive
Nidaa Abu Hasna, 30, recalls with a special fondness the first time she saw a film in a movie theater. It happened when she was 26 years old, in an Egyptian cinema on a three-day trip to visit a friend before starting her master’s in film studies in Tunisia. She had just graduated with a degree in radio and television from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City. She watched a comedy starring an actor that she wasn’t a huge fan of, but loved the experience. “I really liked buying the tickets and the popcorn,” she says, and recalls being surprised by the size of the theater and screen. “In Gaza, there’s nothing like that. I liked sharing the experience with other people and laughing. It was a fun day I’ll never forget,” she says from a refugee camp in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, via WhatsApp.
Abu Hasna is particularly interested in social and documentary film, “because it’s quite connected to reality.” As a cinematographic producer, she feels a responsibility to “document all the crimes that the [Israeli] occupation is committing” against Gazans. Her short film Beyond the Frame tells the story of an artist, her friend, whose exhibition installed in her father’s home was destroyed in the bombardment of a neighboring house.
Filming the short, she says, presented challenges “due to the magnitude of the destruction” and the effects it had on her friend. “Two years of work, destroyed right in front of her. She was devastated,” says Abu Hasna. That’s in addition to the horrors that she herself experienced during the film’s shooting. “Bombs and destruction all the time and everywhere,” which impacted her mental and emotional health. “I was in a very bad mental state, from which I’ve only recovered recently,” she says.
She didn’t plan to be in Gaza during this time, and much less in a refugee camp. She came on a visit in March 2023 and planned to return to Tunisia in November of the same year to begin her doctorate in audiovisual sciences and film, researching the disruptive narratives of Palestinian film. “I went to attend my sister’s wedding, I was preparing to get my driver’s license and for the first year of my doctorate,” she says. She could have fled the Strip during the first month of the war, but she didn’t want to leave her family and return to her studies in Tunisia “as if nothing was happening.” “I never imagined that it would go on for this long,” she says.
Although she has a gut feeling that she should stay to document what is happening in Gaza, she also hopes to return to her schooling in Tunisia as soon as possible because “Gaza is no longer a place where one can live.” She feels trapped in an unending paradox: she has to document, but at the same time, she can’t. “We live in the contradiction of having a deep need of documentation, and a deep need to save our lives and get out. Amid these paradoxes, our lives are being wasted.
Translated by Caitlin O’Donohue.
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