Hills of rubble and blocks of tents formed the opening, or the inevitable background, for several of the 22 films in the heartwrenching Palestinian anthology From Ground Zero. The package from Gaza, which was even pulled from Cannes, was screened on the opening day of the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK). The screening became an unmistakable gesture of solidarity with the war-torn country
The impact of every film – fiction, documentary, and even animation – was felt in the darkness of the theatre, which erupted into applause at the end of all 22 segments.
The anthology was screened on August 22, the same day the United Nations confirmed famine in Gaza city. The timing left the audience fearing for the lives of the cast and crew — children, grownups, and the elderly — who risked so much to create something out of the havoc.
That risk becomes heartbreakingly clear in one of the films, Taxi Wanissa. Midway through, the director, Etimad Washah, says she had to stop because she was shattered by the news of her brother and his family dying in an explosion. It was perhaps too much to hope that the films might offer a diversion – like music and dance do for the young woman in Flashback, who wears headphones to block out the sounds of war.
It is not all tears and melancholy you hear in the practical voices of the survivors, but more the numbness of the reality of those who expect death at any moment. When the children in Soft Skin show their names inscribed on their hands and legs, you don't expect them to add matter-of-factly, it is so that their body parts can be identified if they get blown up. Just as Gaza’s horrors have done, the films expose the crumbled lives of its children. Words become unnecessary when you watch the child in A School Day wake up, pack his school bag, and walk to a grave to pick out his textbook and read, as the camera zooms in on the gravestone bearing his teacher’s name. When food is a luxury, school becomes either a relic of the past or a thing of dreams.
There are also no words in the film Recycling, showing the journey of a mother, fetching a heavy jug of water to the ruins of a building where her child waits. She drinks from it, bathes and feeds her kid, and cleans, and even pours the dirty remains for the plants.
These are not simply touching narratives – they are finely made films, conveying much in just a few minutes. All 22 are completed in 110 minutes. But in that time, you watch the joys of a stand-up comedian who brings hope by performing every single day of the war [Everything is Fine], a woman who wants music and love to be the message of her film [No], and a man who covers himself in a burial shroud because he needs its warmth while he is alive [Hell’s Heaven]. It is remarkable they can still find humour to coat their miseries with.
The expression changes to poetry when a woman regrets leaving her books behind as she escapes [Overburden], to puppetry when a man who lost memory in the 2014 war regains it in 2024 and wishes he hadn’t [Awakening], to art as an artist goes through the remains of her paintings and sculptures in a bombed house [Out of Frame], unable to send them to the University because that too was blown up.
All of them speak with the numbness of the child who shows to her friend the rubble she was pulled out of when everyone else in her family died [Farah and Myriam]. Another young man is impassive as he recounts how he almost got killed thrice in 24 hours, trapped under the rubble of buildings that fell on top of him over and over again [24 Hours]. No dream or nightmare this, death has become so much a part of life that neither the young nor the old seem to mind it hanging about among their midst.
All 22 filmmakers keep their parts subtle, not an easy feat when you are telling your stories from Gaza. Israel is not even mentioned. They got their training from tutors in West Asia and Europe and experienced coordinators on the ground. The data was transferred to France for post production. The film itself became possible with the support of the Masharawi Fund, for films in Gaza, founded by Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi.