They fled from Gaza to Egypt — will they ever find their way back home?

Palestinians search the rubble of al-Ghafari tower after its destruction by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on September 15, 2025. Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images

By Olivia Haynie September 18, 2025

The Voice of Hind Rajab, tracing the broken state of aid in Gaza, got a lot of attention at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion. Many of the festival’s political demonstrations were connected to the movie about a little girl’s death in Gaza, and its premiere stirred up a storm of discourse online.

But there was another film bringing the stories of Palestinians to the Venice Film Festival: Who Is Still Alive. The documentary, directed by Nicolas Wadimoff, tells the stories of nine Gazans who fled to Egypt before the Rafah border crossing was permanently closed in 2024. Now in South Africa, they have come together to share memories of home.

The group starts by gathering around a handdrawn outline of Gaza. Each person takes turns talking about their homes, sketching the physical details onto the map as they reminisce about their lives before the war. Feras Elshafri recounts going to concerts on the beach. Ghala Alabadla remembers her family’s olive trees and the freedom of riding her bicycle.

But the conversation soon switches from reminiscing about home to mourning it, as they begin to discuss how their neighborhoods were destroyed. From here, the film switches between group discussion and monologues of each person recounting their flight from Gaza. They tell their stories in front of a solid black background with virtually no photo or video accompaniments. Each story is unique, yet they share several elements: losing family in the rubble of bombed buildings, watching the destruction of their neighborhoods online, having to make the last minute decisions of what part of home to take along.

Dr. Eman Shannan made her family members all grab their educational records and diplomas before they fled. She later saw an image of a bombed neighborhood on social media and was only able to recognize it as her own from the last standing landmark, a local mosque. Elshafri, a musician, chose to take his qanun, a stringed instrument plucked like a harp. While telling his story, he performs the song he was playing when a building next to him in Deir al-Balah was bombed. He remembers the exact note when the explosion happened, ending the song there abruptly in his reenactment.

Despite the dark, empty setting, the film doesn’t feel flat. Wadimoff, who directed the documentaries The Apollo of Gaza and Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza), has tapped into the power of first person testimony. By giving audiences faces and names to put to the stories that have been populating the news, Wadimof shown the deeply personal side of what is, for most international audiences, an intangible consequence of a distant war. As one person explains, the loss is not just material: “The home is the most important family member.”

The film’s minimalism is a breath of fresh air from the gratuitous images of violence that have pervaded coverage of the war, including in other films, social media and the news. Wadimoff is smart to depart from this structure, given accusations that photos and images of suffering Palestinians are exploited by Western media.

Still, the experience of remembering is traumatic in its own way. Adel Altaweel, one of the group members, creates a map on a dark floor, so each person can stand in the spot where their home used to be. Another member, Jawdat Khoudary, overcome with emotion, asks Altaweel if he can step away from the map. But Altaweel insists Khoudary stay, asking if they don’t tell their story, who will?

Khoudary struggles the most out of the group with how to process the loss of his home. He admits that when the Israeli army first arrived, he was against leaving. But three days later, his family left him no choice. They packed their belongings into a car and told him “It’s either run or die.”

Now, he has grown so cynical about the future of Gaza that he tells others in the group to drop the idea of ever returning. At the same time, he is also one of the most sentimental. He shares a poem he wrote about how his soul remains in Gaza. “The most dangerous battle of all is the battle between the mind and the heart,” Khoudary says, as he tries to reconcile these two sides of himself.

Since the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 3rd, the situation in Gaza has only worsened. Some consider Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza City to be the last nail in the coffin on any chances of an independent Gaza. The chances that any of the refugees will be allowed to return seems slim to none. As Who Is Still Alive shows, even if you are able to take pieces of home with you, there is an emotional tear caused by separation from the physical land.

Yet this same idea — that land holds identity, that leaving it causes trauma — is core to justifications for Israel’s existence and takeover of Palestinian land in the first place. Many Zionists believe the Jewish soul cannot thrive if it is separated from its spiritual homeland. Plenty of Jews across the diaspora, even those who’ve never lived in Israel, believe that part of their soul rests in Israel.

The immediate concern of Who Is Still Alive is the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, but its message is more existential. It shows — perhaps unintentionally —what Palestinian refugees and Zionists have in common: a yearning for a home where their body and soul can be one.