This collection of short films from Gaza film-makers gives a mosaic of images, ideas and microvignettes of what life is like for civilians under nonstop attack, sometimes improvising semi-fictionalised scenes within the scenes of devastation. It is a humanitarian artistic project in which the words “Hamas” and “Israel” are not mentioned; instead we hear the voices of young and old, male and female, people for whom the violence and the grief have become part of the fabric of everyday life. Perhaps the simple fact of life going on there, with stoicism and often with humour, is a remarkable thing in itself.
In Nidal Damo’s Everything Is Fine, a budding standup comedian wanders around, wondering how to ply his trade when all the venues are rubble; a class of schoolkids learn how to create stop-motion animation about their lives in Khamis Masharawi’s Soft Skin. Ahmed Hassouna’s Sorry Cinema is a film in which he says he once lived and breathed movies, and longed for the day when a film of his would be accepted at a big film festival. Now he says he just wants to survive day to day and apologises to cinema for neglecting it – but the irony is that the images of uproar and destruction that he is capturing are spectacularly cinematic.
For me, one of the most startling pieces was Taxi Wanissa by Etimad Washah, about a man called Ahmad with his donkey, called Wanissa. There is a climactic scene in which Washah has captured some (genuine) bombing; the scene cuts to black and then Washah herself addresses the camera and says that she intended Ahmad to die in the bombing and the donkey to return home unharmed. But in the middle of the shoot, she says, she heard that her brother had been killed and now wishes to stop. She no longer has the heart for this film, or perhaps it is rather that this sudden intrusion became the ending – the authentic ending. A heartbreaking collection.
