“From Ground Zero” is a rare work for which superlatives are not only inadequate but useless. It’s an anthology of 22 short subject by Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Most are a few minutes long. Some are nonfiction, some are scripted dramas, and some are hybrids, in the Neorealist tradition created by Italians who cobbled together achingly personal art in the ruins of World War II.
Overseen by director-producer Rashid Masharawi, it’s a staggering achievement, and not just because of the mere fact of its existence. Like many documentaries about Ukraine released after the Russian invasion, it shows you what it’s like to live day-to-day on the ground through a genocide as a mechanized military is targeting civilian buildings; killing noncombatants, including children; and forcing survivors to scramble for basics like food and water. But “From Ground Zero” has value beyond its report from Hell in that it shows that, after a catastrophe, art is not only still possible but necessary — and that digital technology makes it possible for people to continue to preserve and share their stories even after they’ve lost almost everything else.
Most of the footage was captured with iPhones, though a few professional filmmakers who were living and working in Gaza and were effectively imprisoned there after October 2023 employ better-quality cameras and lenses. A few crop their images to the wide and narrow CinemaScope dimension, as if to visually insist that, even after all they’ve endured, they are still making cinema, not YouTube clips.
Intricate narrative is not a priority in these works because, to put it mildly, the conditions aren’t conducive. Multiple segments show people stripping wood from destroyed homes so they can burn them to cook food, purify tainted water, or stay warm on cold nights. The buzz of Israeli drones is constant. Everybody’s lost multiple family members. It’s probably a little miracle to even get a five-minute documentary shot and edited when each day begins by asking questions like, “Was anyone I love killed last night?” or “Will I eat today?” Most of the short subjects are fragmented (one is actually titled “Fragments”), and they tend to leave you with an observation, a feeling, or an image. In total, this is the cinematic equivalent of a compilation of songs or a chapbook of poetry with a wide array of contributors focusing on the same subject—in this case, life in the ruins.
Karim Satoum’s “Hell’s Heaven” is a potent little metaphor presented as a physical experience: a man wakes up in a tent inside of a body bag with no idea how he got in it, then unzips it, walks around all day, and returns at night to zip himself back up again. Functionally, he might as well be dead; the rest is details. Nidal Damo’s “Everything is Fine” follows a stand-up comedian as he tells us how not even the misery of Gaza has killed his desire to practice his art. His stage is the street now. His backdrop is rubble. We see him take “a shower” before his performance by boiling water in a pot over a wood fire, then bathing in a makeshift stall.
Multiple films are about the possibilities for education and self-improvement that were lost to the open-air charnel house of Gaza. Tamer Nijim’s “The Teacher” follows a former schoolteacher (Alaa Najim) around the remains of his neighborhood as he struggles through a typical day. “School Day,” by Ahmed Al Danaf, follows a young boy (Yahya Saad) who lives along in a small tent and still observes the ritual of going to school every day, even though all that’s left of the school is a pile of debris and a small marker commemorating his own teacher, who was killed by the Israeli military.
“Soft Skin,” by Khamis Masharawi, is about an animator teaching the craft to children who were separated from their parents (or possibly orphaned). The kids combine their own individual stories into one narrative and shoot it with an iPhone mounted on a flimsy tripod. Cut-paper cartoons representing the bombing of a city block are synchronized with audio from an actual bombing. The animated movie focuses on a brother and sister whose mother wrote their names on their limbs in permanent marker so they could be identified even if bombs dismembered them. “Flashback,” by Islam El Zeriei, is a character sketch of a girl (Farah Al Zerei) describing the destruction of her home, the decimation of her family, and the PTSD she’s suffered in the aftermath; it begins with her talking about her “go bag,” which she and everyone else in the family keep handy in case they have to suddenly flee. Neda’a Abu Hasna’s “Out of Frame” introduces us to a painter who has continued working on her graduate project even though the Israeli military blew up her university two weeks earlier.
“Sorry, Cinema,” by Ahmed Hassouna, is an apology to the art form for the filmmaker’s inability to pursue his dreams. “Forgive me cinema, I must put the camera aside and run with the others,” he narrates. The end of “Sorry, Cinema” comes pretty close to summarizing the entire feeling of this anthology: it’s an assemblage of first-person footage of Hassouna running along with other Gaza residents towards a cluster of rations falling from the sky, their falls broken by small parachutes. They’re all running as fast as they can. One man is driving a small cart pulled by a donkey. A couple of small service trucks rush into the frame and quickly disappear into the distance, and a lot of the runners give up and slow down because they can’t compete. One of the ration packages was a brick of flour that broke open on the ground. That doesn’t stop people from trying to gather the dregs. “As you can see, we are picking up flour and sand,” says an unidentified man. “We pick up whatever we find on the ground. We have to eat.”
Inevitably, a sense of urgency and incompleteness hangs over “From Ground Zero.” Everybody here is doing the best they can with what they’ve got. Technical problems or conceptual or stylistic flaws become irrelevant in a context like this. I suppose there are a few things that could be better, but to mention them here would be like critiquing the grammar of a letter handwritten from a deathbed.
We don’t always understand the connections between people within individual stories and have to intuit them (there were a lot of families working together, as evidenced by recurring last names). We don’t know what happened to any individual person who was profiled in a nonfiction segment or who performed in a scripted segment. Rather than being confusing, this has a universalizing effect. We feel it could happen to us, too, or that it is happening to us, thanks to the empathy machine aspect of cinema storytelling.
The common thread linking all the pieces is the desire to make personal art no matter what obstacles are placed in the artist’s path. Even amid so much murder and destruction, the urge to create abides. For all its horror and sadness, this is one of the most hopeful films I’ve ever seen.
In theaters now.
