Aarcflick

 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 antho...