FROM GROUND ZERO: STORIES FROM GAZA (Rashid Mashrawi et al. 2024)

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IMAGE,FROM GROUND ZERO

RASHID MASHRAWI (et al.): FROM GROUND ZERO: STORIES FROM GAZA (2024)

TRAILER

Self portrait of a genocide

From Ground Zero consists of 22 short films made in Gaza at the instigation of the Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi. They were created under the most desperate conditions of the Gaza genocide, to show it, and they do. So effectively that, despite rough edges, the film has become one of the fifteen International Feature Film Oscar finalists, representing Palestine. You cannot "review" these short films. To do so, Matt Zoller Seitz says in his Ebert.com review, "would be like critiquing the grammar of a letter handwritten from a deathbed." Let's hope it's not a deathbed but a birth of art out of darkness. Even if you already were full of grief and outrage, this will make you feel more.

The short film collection, now in US theaters, includes animation and fiction, but in effect it's overwhelmingly documentary, because whatever format each director uses, he or she is documenting the devastation and chaos of a tiny territory - Norman Finkelstein has famously described the pre-war Gaza as an open-air prison, and he, with others, has explained that this is not a "war," still less a "conflict," but, since October 7, a "genocide" that has been taking place. The short films of From Ground Zero show, not tell. They don't have to tell. But hopefully seeing them will inspire the uninformed to inform themselves about the larger story these small pictures point to.

And how devastating these pictures are. I have not been moved to tears so often in a film that I can remember.

Viewers will differ on how much they are moved and by which films. Some that stood out for me were the following:

A schoolboy. In "School Day" by Ahmed Al Danaf, a youth gets up among the tents where the survivors all live, dresses nicely, packs notebooks and texts in a book bag, shoulders it, and marches off. He walks briskly all across the camp to where his school used to be, before it was bombed out of existence. He sits dsown in front of his teacher - whose grave stands marked by a piece of cardboard.

The end of a life...In "Jad and Natalie" by Aws Al Banna, a documentary, the speaker, Aws, a theater actor, tells us his life has ended because of the death of Nour, his wife to be. He describes how they were to get married soon, and they had already chosen the names of their firstborn son and daughter, Jan and Natalie.

The labeled kids. In Khamis Masharawi's "Soft Skin," the children, a boy and girl, show how their mother wrote their names in big letters, in flowing Arabic, with felt pen on their arms, so they could be identified. They couldn't sleep till they had rubbed the writing off. There are other films of children, art work, and making an animated film. The children: they are so alive, so winsome. Their beauty is felt like a wound. The film includes an animated segment.

The use of water. In Rabab Khamis' concise document "Recycling," a woman fetches a large plastic jug filled with water and climbs up the stairs to bring it back to where she lives. The film takes us through the steps in the water's ultra-efficient use from drinking it and sharing the cup with her small daughter, to cooking, to washing, to watering the plants and finally to flushing the toilet. Every drop has been well used. (This may make you stop leaving the water running.)

The lovely life that was. There is the beautiful young woman who goes out with nice makeup on and shows us the lovely former life that was, the signs of which are still present. Her roomy, attractive house still stands, but is no longer usable. She takes us on a tour of it.

The body bag. In "Hell's Haven" by Karim Satoum, there is a guy who wakes up in the crowded tent camp, again where they all live, in a body bag. (It is zipped up, and white.) He doesn't know how this happened. By the end of the film he has requested that he be allowed to use a body bag now, while he was alive. It will be more use to him now. He has nothing else to sleep in. You will see how often the people in these films tell how many of their family members have died. One man describes how everyone in his life was killed in the course of a single twenty-four-hour period.

Views from a distance. It's been commented that these filmmakers cannot show the whole picture, but here we do get a look back, and realize there were some nice houses in Gaza. There are also some views of central areas crowded with people moving around. It looks like a prison camp but they are also very energetic. The women in robes are often immaculate. The men often wear slim black sweatpants, tucked at the bottom. The men usually wear sandals. (How do they walk over all the broken stones in sandals?)

There is common environment, assumed, but always shocking. The hum of drones overhead is incessant. There are piles of rubble everywhere where once were active neighborhoods. Bodies are being trapped under fresh piles of rubble and there are harrowing tales told of escaping, or not escaping, the rubble. Everywhere there are vast clusters of tents housing people forced into homelessness, bereft of large families most of whose members have been killed in Israel's relentless bombing - 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, more than those dropped during World War II on Dresden, Hamburg,and London combined. But these films show the effects, they do ot provide history or statistics.

The running men. Most energetic of all is the group of men and boys who are running in a crowd to collect food and supplies dropped with large white balloons over a large area. Two of them memorably wind up scraping flour and sand off the ground. We realize that there are few vehicles and little fuel and a big way to get around is walking -- or in the case of the able-bodied men, running. We also see a variety of igneous improvised vehicles. And one short film, left incomplete because the middle aged woman director became too depressed - she tall us - about a donkey that pulls a cart loaded with men.

The collective picture that emerges from this collection is complex and richly detailed beyond any other film about Gaza, but anyway there has been virtually no film footage of present-day Gaza. But as I say this I remember Norman Finkelstein's words, "Gaza has been completely destroyed. It no longer exists.

It has not quite been destroyed, not yet. Or had not when these films were made. It is being destroyed. The final Israeli solution is famine. And that is, by reports, well under way.

A collection beyond criticism, beyond understanding, beyond grief, beyond rage.

The individual short films were directed by : Aws Al-Banna, Ahmed Al-Danf, Basil Al-Maqousi, Mustafa Al-Nabih, Muhammad Alshareef,Ala Ayob, Bashar Al Balbisi, Alaa Damo, Awad Hani, Ahmad Hassunah, Mustafa Kallab, Satoum Kareem, Mahdi Karera, Rabab Khamees, Khamees Masharawi, Wissam Moussa, Tamer Najm, Abu Hasna Nidaa, Damo Nidal, Mahmoud Reema, Etimad Weshah and Islam Al Zrieai. More details of the films are listed on an Arab Film and Media Institute website page.

From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza, 112 mins., debuted at Toronto. US limited release Jan. 3, 2025. Metacritic rating: 83%.