A filmmaker burns his clapperboard for warmth. A schoolteacher scavenges to feed his students. A stand-up comedian arrives at a gig to find the venue bombed. In “From Ground Zero,” Palestine’s entry for the Oscars’ international feature film category, 22 directors present cinematic diaries from Gaza, shot in between (and sometimes, during) IDF bombing raids to weave a portrait of life under siege. Each short is unique in its conception, and yet, is bound by a common resilience, and a need to document the violent interruption of life and routine.
Stricken from the Cannes lineup back in May on political grounds, the anthology was screened just outside the festival as an act of protest: a fitting premiere for a defiant act of creativity in the face of genocide. Coordinated and funded by filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, “From Ground Zero” brings dozens of emerging artists to the fore, as they present digital memories and DIY chronicles of modern life in the Gaza Strip. The shorts range from a couple of minutes in length to nearly ten. Some are charming and wistful, like Reema Mahmoud’s opening documentary portrait “Selfies,” about a young woman using makeup to disguise her stress and retain a sense of femininity as the world crumbles around her. Others, like Muhammad Alshareef’s “No Signal”— which immediately follows “Selfies” — use the rubble of collapsed buildings to stage intense fictitious scenes drawn from reality.
None of these stories or approaches ever feel incongruous with one another, or with the overall project. In fact, their variety is the point, as each one depicts a different facet of social and personal life in its creators’ vicious new realities, whether they deal with death in the abstract — as in Kareem Satoum’s absurd “Hell’s Heaven,” in which a man sleeps in a body bag for comfort — or with grief as their new normal. It’s a wonder only one of the films in the lineup is left incomplete, with its director showing up on screen to detail her original plans before her loved ones were killed in a manner that rendered her project too painful to approach.
While most footage is contemporaneous, a number of shorts feature brief flashbacks or superimposed images of life before the start of the Israel-Hamas War, imbuing the project with a palpable sense of loss — that of the subjects’ social lives, and of their loved ones. And yet, “From Ground Zero” contains, within its many cuts to black between each short, a sense of history. The artists may have been exposed to cruel new extremes, but their sense of confinement, and their familiarity with war, goes back years — if not decades — a subject broached in poetic fashion by Mahdi Karirah’s haunting concluding chapter “Awakening,” told with marionettes made of scraps.
The filmmaking ingenuity on display is undoubtedly impressive, but it’s self-reflexive too, between the lo-fi digital quality of most shorts and the sense that the movie’s very texture is a commentary too. The digital world has been Palestine’s smoke-signal amidst ongoing atrocities. Many snippets of Gaza’s plight have made their way onto social media (one in particular, of a man being rescued from the debris of his home, is the subject of one story in the film), but few of these fleeting clips have provided such an in-depth look at the lives of Gaza’s citizens. The psychological impact of their plight is made detailed and evident, but so is 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 the most familiar to the public were snapped either by perpetrators or liberators. “From Ground Zero” exists more in the tradition of photographers Henryk Ross and Mendel Grossman, inhabitants of Poland’s Jewish ghettos who not only documented daily life with their cameras, but imbued it with a familiar, beating humanity. In that vein, it’s hard to ignore just how much “From Ground Zero” feels like history unfolding, and tragedy being memorialized, right before our eyes.
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