Palestinian director Rashid Mashwari invited filmmakers from Gaza to submit three- to six-minute short films about their everyday experience of life under the threat of annihilation. The results are as harrowing, eclectic and persevering as the people of Palestine themselves, and under Mashwari’s supervision, they have been compiled into a 22-part anthology that offers roughly one story for every 2,100 people who have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023 (according to the latest published figures). The fact that “From Ground Zero” exists at all is both a tragedy and a miracle in uneven measure, a fact that proves impossible to forget over the course of a film whose every frame has been salvaged from the rubble of an ongoing genocide.
As with most anthologies, some of these short films are more effective than others, and even the best of those you’ll find here suffer from the brevity imposed on them by the scale of their format. And yet, “From Ground Zero” is a rarity among anthologies, in that the shortcomings of its individual pieces often serve to reinforce the collective strength of the project itself.
Directors: Aws Al-Banna, Ahmed Al-Danf, Basil Al-Maqousi
Stars: Aws Al-Banna, Kenzi Al Balbisi, Mohammed Kamel
The tonal and aesthetic “sameness” that allows some of these short films to blend into one another (despite their formal variety) reflects the filmmakers’ crushing indifference to extermination and becomes its own denunciation of the humanitarian crisis at hand. Likewise, the resources available to the film’s collaborators speak to the gravity of their situation, both in scarcity (personnel and equipment) and abundance (grief and debris), just as the vitality of the films they’ve managed to make about their survival speaks to the collective resilience of their creative spirit.
And that resilience is ultimately what makes “From Ground Zero” even more remarkable than it first appears. Mashwari frames the anthology as a cinematic message in a bottle (a metaphor made literal by Reema Mahmoud’s powerful opening short film), and the project is galvanized by the intimate urgency of hearing directly from the people of Palestine themselves.
But as harrowing as its individual glimpses of life in Gaza may be, “From Ground Zero” is such an effective plea for humanity because its shorts coalesce into a broader, more specific portrait of the artists cut short. Taken together, the film clarifies the scope of the Palestinian crisis—and counters the numbness that such atrocities can inspire as they drag on—by so directly addressing the purpose and possibility of creative expression in the face of death.
None of the filmmakers featured in “From Ground Zero” wanted to make these films, and several of them openly lament their inability to do anything else. In Ahmed Hassouna’s achingly sad “Sorry, Cinema,” the director laments the destruction of Palestine’s movie theaters (there are none left) and how war has thwarted his dream of shooting fiction. Forced back into documentary by a conflict that has made survival the only viable way to tell stories in his country, Hassouna wistfully celebrates the fact that his only scripted feature played at a festival before the bombs fell, and apologizes to the movies themselves for no longer being able to capture the world’s imagination in the same way. The joy of creation has become inseparable from the agony of witnessing. In one of the anthology’s most heartbreaking moments, Hassouna recalls how he used to wish there were 48 hours in a day to make movies, but now wishes there were only 12.
It’s no coincidence that the anthology’s other standout film is equally self-reflexive, and perhaps even more so. Etimad Washah’s “Taxi Wanissa” begins as a seemingly fictional story about a family man who feeds his wife and children using the family donkey as a taxi. I say “seemingly” because the iPhone cinematography and constant drone of Israeli drones have a way of diluting any of the clues that might otherwise help us distinguish between “narrative” and “documentary” modes (the teenage protagonist of Islam Al Zeriei’s “Flashback” wears oversized headphones in an effort to mute the sci-fi drone that covers him).
A few minutes into the short, Washah suddenly appears onscreen and speaks to the camera, telling us that his brother and family were killed by a bomb during filming, and that he lost the will to finish production on his film. His character was going to suffer the same fate, leaving his donkey to make it home on its own, but reality imposed its will faster than Washah could stage his version.
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