A scene from the Palestinian anthology film ‘From Ground Zero’
One of the thoughts that constantly runs through the mind while watching From Ground Zero, an anthology of 22 short films and documentaries by Palestinian filmmakers, is on whether all those whom we see on screen are alive now. Going by the data of over 60,000 killed in the past two years in Gaza, in what human rights organisations have accused Israel of executing genocide, there is a possibility that at least some of them have perished already.
The 2024 anthology, the opening film of the 17th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), was kept out of the 77th Cannes Film Festival, after being selected for a world premiere, prompting project director and funder Rashid Masharawi to organise a protest screening outside. Common across all the 22 shorts in the anthology is the background filled with rubbles of buildings amid which are scattered the everyday things which belonged to families who have all ended up in relief camps. It might be impossible to find a background without rubble in post-2023 Gaza.
One of the most poignant shorts in the anthology is Ahmed Al Danaf’s A School Day, in which a young boy gets ready for school in the morning, walks by tents and the ruins of his school to end up in a cemetery, where he sits beside his dead teacher’s tombstone to study the day’s lessons. In Khamis Masharawi’s Soft Skin, a group of children have a discussion on the practise of their mothers of writing their names on their limbs to identify them if they are killed in bombings. The discussion segues into them creating a moving animation of the children wiping away those names to overcome their nightmares.
The stories are not all filled with despair, rather many of them reveal the capabilities of humans to find hope and even humour in the most dire situations. Karim Satoum’s Hell’s Heaven has him waking up in a body bag inside a small, freezing tent and attempting to retrace the events that led him to end up inside that. Turns out, he had bargained with the authorities to spare him a body bag, which could be more useful for him in the freezing cold than when he is eventually dead. In Nidal Damo’s Everything is Fine, a standup comedian literally attempts to make his fellow countrymen feel so amid extreme suffering, with his radiant performances in refugee camps.
The never-ending sufferings of Palestinians, right from Nakba, the large-scale displacement and killings of Palestinians in 1948, to the present is captured in Mahdi Kreirah’s Awakening, a puppetry video in which a father who lost his memory in an explosion in 2014 regains it in another bombing in 2024. In Nida’a Abu Hassnah’s Out of Frame, a young artist walks through her destroyed studio, picking out from the rubble her favourite art works which had won her some amount of fame in the past.
For the world at large which is numbed by the daily reports of the normalised killing of hundreds of Palestinians even in relief camps, food queues and hospitals, these personal stories can be a hard-hitting watch. In putting faces, names and stories to this ongoing tragedy, From Ground Zero is one of the remarkable collaborative filmmaking efforts of our times.
Published – August 23, 2025 08:25 pm IST
