Are these 22 films about Gaza headed to the Academy Awards?
‘From Ground Zero’ combines numerous shorts — some documentary, some fiction — to blur the lines between fact and fiction
A man and his niece in Gaza pick through rubble, looking for her father, as bombs boom overhead. Courtesy of Watermelon Pictures
By Mira Fox January 9, 2025
One might expect Palestine’s submission to the Academy Awards to make a strong political statement, to castigate Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza or occupation in the West Bank. But From Ground Zero, executive produced by Michael Moore and shortlisted for Best International Feature, is surprisingly devoid of an overt political message.
That’s partially due to its format: The film is actually a compilation of 22 shorts, each made by a different Palestinian filmmaker in Gaza. Some of the stories are surprisingly optimistic. Others are full of pain. Some are scripted, some are animated, some are documentaries. The only throughline is the way the war shapes its subjects’ lives.
In a way, the movie feels akin to opening social media to see the constant stream of videos coming out of Gaza: “24 hours” mixes cellphone footage of and interviews with a man who was trapped under bombed buildings twice in one day, his entire family dead around him. “The Teacher” follows an older man on his futile search for water and to recharge his phone; though scripted, it might as well be real.
But in some ways, those scenes, the ones most akin to what already fills my feeds, are less moving than the simple or gestural shorts. Instead of bombarding us with the same set of facts people have become inured to, well over a year into the war, they try to convey the experience and the emotions of living through those facts using artistic vignettes.
“Echo,” a short by Mustafa Kallab, consists of a single shot, just a man smoking on the beach at sunset, as a recording of a phone call with his wife plays over the scene. You can hear bombs falling in the background as he alternately tells her to run to shelter and berates her for leaving the house in the first place. “Why did you go out under the bombs?” he asks repeatedly, in between prayers. “Yasmine? What’s happening?”
Or “Soft Skin,” from Khamees Masharawi, which combines documentary footage with stop-motion animation. We see children learning animation in a tent where several adults help them cut out paper characters and photograph them. As one girl tells of her mother writing her name on her body in thick marker in case she is killed, we watch her paper cutout rub her little brother’s name off of his arm so he doesn’t have nightmares.
One of the most impactful shorts is also one of the most challenging. In Taxi Wanissa, we watch a man drive his donkey cart around the city. But it ends abruptly when its director, Etimad Washah, appears in the frame. She explains that she never finished her film because her brother and his entire family were killed; she was too distraught to continue. The ending she had planned, she says, was for the taxi driver to be killed and the donkey to continue alone, but she decided her testimony would be more powerful.
Until that moment, though, I had assumed the film was one of the pieces of documentary. I had no idea it was scripted.
In a war where much of the battle has been over what information is real and whether videos have been manipulated or taken out of context, From Ground Zero dares to blur the lines. People accuse videos from Gaza of being “Pallywood” productions, staged by manipulative propagandists vying for Western sympathy. Others question the veracity of Israel’s shots of destroyed kibbutzes or caches of Hamas weaponry.
Yet From Ground Zero makes no effort to differentiate between real clips and fantastical ones. I found myself wondering whether a clip of an uncle and his niece searching for her father under rubble was real — as the young girl calls her father’s cellphone repeatedly, he finally picks up just as the phone dies. Isn’t that timing too good to be true? Did the cameraman really manage to catch that moment?
As a journalist, I was annoyed at times that the film was confusing its audience, adding to the fog of war. At other moments, I wondered: Who am I to deny artistry to these filmmakers? Just because they’re living through a catastrophe doesn’t mean they should be forbidden to find richness in abstraction or play in a liminal space.
And the film does play; it even finds humor in the war. In one short, “Hell’s Heaven,” we see a man climb out of a body bag. At first, I thought the film would be a surrealist video about a ghost, but it turns out the man doesn’t have any blankets in his tent, so he decided he might as well enjoy the warmth of the body bag while he’s still living. In fact, the films largely keep their distance from the death and blood we see in the news, focusing more on small moments of humor or joy.
They also avoid one other big part of the story: Israel. The country is never mentioned by name; discussion of “them” dropping bombs is the closest From Ground Zero gets to mentioning the other half of the war.
Some might argue that this means there is an overt political message embedded in the film, that it ignores Oct. 7, that it denies the existence of Israel, even that directing attention to everyday Palestinians distracts from the violence of Hamas or the plight of the hostages. And it is, in a way, political to force audiences to think about the humanity of the citizens trapped in Gaza; ending the war would save these children. Even the film’s Oscar bid feels political to some; the Academy Awards has been accepting Palestinian films since 2003, but only in 2014 did they begin to refer to them as nominations from “Palestine” instead of from the “Palestinian territories.
But From Ground Zero doesn’t assign blame to one side or the other. It’s simply a collection of art from a place from which it’s hard to imagine creativity flourishing. Ultimately, the film is not about Israel or death tolls or even war. It’s about the humanity of the people still living in Gaza, and their fight to hang onto whatever scraps of artistry, humor and beauty they can find.
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