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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PALESTINIAN FILMMAKERS ARE DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE TO CAPTURE THEIR
STORIES  
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Matt MInton
January 10, 2025
The Progressive
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_ "We are not belonging to anybody or to any party. We are artists,
filmmakers from Gaza, who want to tell our stories to the world
because what’s going on is not fair. We want the people to
understand." _

Palestinian Flag, istock

 

A young girl listens to music in her headphones while the sound of
missiles and bombs destroy the only home she’s ever known. A girl
and her uncle stand on top of a bombed house, looking for her father
trapped below. They keep calling his phone to see if he is still
alive. A group of children help create stop-motion films about their
mothers writing names on their arms in case they are bombed and
disfigured.

These are just a few of the striking moments found in _From Ground
Zero_, a collection of twenty-two short films from Palestinian
directors, all shot in Gaza during Israel’s attacks since October 7,
2023. Shortly after the war started, Masharawi came up with the
anthology idea and opened up submissions to filmmakers and artists
across the region to submit their work. Out of the fifty submissions,
he chose twenty-two.

[Soft Skin.jpg]

'No Other Land'

The film was recently named to the Oscars shortlist for Best
International Film, representing Palestine, alongside _No Other Land_
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Best Documentary Feature. And the recent addition of activist and
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore as an executive
producer has drawn even more eyes to the film.

_The Progressive_ spoke with Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi,
the creator and producer of_ From Ground Zero_, who has been working
as a director for several decades. He created the Cinema Production
and Distribution Center in 1996 to provide workshops for young
filmmakers in Palestine. Although Masharawi is not currently located
in Gaza, his latest project tracks connected themes among the short
films and emphasizes the need to continue creating and supporting art
in Palestine amid the ongoing crisis. The interview has been edited
for length and clarity.

Q: YOU’VE HAD A PROLIFIC CAREER AS A DIRECTOR. IN _FROM GROUND
ZERO_, YOU DIRECTED YOUR EFFORTS TOWARDS SUPPORTING THE WORK OF OTHER
PALESTINIAN FILMMAKERS. WHAT LED YOU TO CREATE THIS PROJECT?

RASHID MASHARAWI: Sometimes when things like this happen—the war in
Gaza and all of what we watched during the first weeks—it makes you
change your priorities and also, in reality, change your way of
thinking to adapt yourself to what's going on on the ground. I created
a society to support films and filmmakers in Gaza called the Masharawi
Fund For Films and Filmmakers in Gaza. I created it especially because
of what’s going on in Gaza, because of the war, because I have the
feeling that there are so many stories that should be told to the
world. 

I was in France during the war, but I was born in Gaza. I grew up in
Gaza. All my family are in Gaza. I made many films in Gaza and about
Gaza, but when this war broke out, I was out [of Gaza]. As a
filmmaker, I thought it’s better for this film to let the people on
the ground participate, give a chance to twenty-two filmmakers, from
women and men who are in Gaza during the war, to share their lives
with others. To come up with an idea of which films they wanted to do,
which stories they wanted to tell, and how they wanted to tell them,
whether it’s fiction or documentary or experimental or whatever. I
was helping them during the editing, because most of the films were
not edited in Gaza—it wasn’t possible because we don’t have
electricity, there is no equipment, or people are in tents and the
priority is to survive.

Q: COULD YOU TALK ABOUT HOW MANY SUBMISSIONS YOU GOT FOR THE FILM AND
HOW YOU DECIDED ON TWENTY-TWO?

MASHARAWI: I think if we had the time and the possibility, we
could’ve ended up with fifty interesting stories, because it’s a
unique situation, and people were coming with ideas from their own
experience. Most of the ideas were personal; people themselves
experienced this life that they wanted to talk about. After I arranged
and organized a group of advisers—filmmakers and friends, from the
Arabic world, Palestinians to Europeans—it was clear for me that we
wanted to go for the untold stories, because we know at the same time
what the televisions were showing. We saw all the news and it was
massacres every day. People are dying. Right now, today, people are
dying from the cold
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from rain, because tents cannot protect them. And they are big
families, and some places are completely covered with water. And when
I say dying, they are really dying. Some kids died yesterday from the
cold. And old people also. 

All the stories were good. We thought to do twenty. We ended up with
twenty-two, and we never thought that this war would last long. When I
started, we thought ‘Two or three months and all this would be
finished,’ and ‘Let’s make some documentation through cinema to
have good filmmaking and stories and to show it to the world.’ We
said it would last four months, then five months, seven months, ten
months. Now we are at fifteen months. We are showing the films in
festivals and in cinemas, and this war is still going on.

Q: I KNOW THIS FILM HAS SCREENED AT MULTIPLE FILM FESTIVALS AROUND THE
WORLD INCLUDING THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF). HAS
ANYTHING SURPRISED OR STUCK WITH YOU ABOUT PEOPLE’S REACTIONS?

MASHARAWI: After the screenings, people say, ‘It’s amazing how
those people fight to live, fight to stick to their own dreams.’ And
this surprised me and also made me feel good that all the ideas, all
the small details in the film, come to the audience. Because we are
talking about art, we are talking about history, we are talking about
culture, and we are presenting people and filmmakers who want to make
films, who want to dance, who want to paint.

Q: YOU MENTIONED HOW MUCH OF THE POST-PRODUCTION WORK HAD TO BE DONE
OUTSIDE OF GAZA. HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO GET THE FOOTAGE OUT OF THE
REGION AND EDIT IT?

MASHARAWI: Four out of the twenty-two filmmakers were editing in Gaza
because it was possible for them to [do so]. With the rest, we edited
them outside with the filmmakers’ [input]. It was very difficult to
bring the material out or to keep in contact with the filmmakers—our
main problem all the time was electricity. Once you don’t have the
electricity, this means you cannot charge your mobile, you cannot
charge your laptop, you cannot charge the batteries of the cameras,
and then you don’t have internet, then we cannot talk. So many times
we lose contact with people, and many times we were awake for a few
days without sleeping, because there is a corner or spot or certain
international SIM card with one journalist or something that we can
use to upload material. We had people in Gaza coordinating the
uploading, and people in France receiving the material. 

Sometimes it was very dangerous to move from one place to another.
It’s always dangerous, because there is no safe place in Gaza, but
we need someone to move with a hard disk from one place to another
place for uploading material. [To do so] is really to risk lives. This
is why I always said—all that we did outside Gaza, it’s nothing.
If you compare what these filmmakers did in Gaza, they did the
impossible to make this project happen. Sometimes I stopped them from
moving because I didn’t want them to risk their lives. I didn’t
want to be responsible for telling somebody to go from here to there
and [for him to] die between and it’s because I told him to. And we
were close to this several times.

Q: MICHAEL MOORE RECENTLY JOINED AS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER. WHAT DOES
HAVING HIS NAME ON THE PROJECT MEAN TO YOU?

MASHARAWI: You are not only having a name or a star, you have a
personality. You have someone who believes in justice, who wants to
make cinema to support humanity. I was at the Cannes Film Festival
when he won
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Palme d’Or for his documentary [_Fahrenheit 9/11_
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Moore is a big end point, because it’s a concept, you know, it’s
not just a name. It’s somebody fighting for freedom, justice. It’s
very important.

Q: ARE THERE OTHER PROJECTS THAT YOU'RE HOPING TO SPEARHEAD IN THE
FUTURE WITH THE MASHARAWI FILM FUND?

MASHARAWI: We established the Masharawi Fund because we needed to be
officially registered and to officially be with co-production, to have
contracts, donations, finance. We also did some training during the
filmmaking. In _From Ground Zero_, there is a short film
called _Soft Scan_, which is an animation about the kids who write
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on their hands
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We left our own tent in Gaza before shooting [to set up one for the
children], we allowed twenty-two kids three weeks of workshops to
teach them paintings and stop motion. They came up with the idea and
with the trainer and the director, they made the film. This was one of
the workshops that we made from the Masharawi Fund. 

Right now, we are filming four documentaries, between twenty to thirty
minutes each, all in Gaza. Three of them have almost finished
shooting. Once we finish this, we are immediately doing another four
films. The aim in the end is to establish a film institute in Gaza to
help the Palestinians in Gaza learn cinema.

Q: IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO ADD?

MASHARAWI: As a filmmaker, I try all the time to manage my dreams
from life and from cinema, and my dream is for the most people
possible to go and to watch these films, because I want our message to
arrive. We want to show that we are the Palestinians in Gaza, we are
human beings like the others. Why the world’s silence? Why did they
leave us dying for fifteen months, including today, searching for food
and medicine, and they are killing us like numbers all the time, and
people condemn it here and there, but on the ground, nothing [has]
happened. So I really want all this to stop. I’m not talking about
the Palestinian state. I'm not talking about any authority. We are not
belonging to anybody or to any party. We are artists, filmmakers from
Gaza, who want to tell our stories to the world because what’s going
on is not fair. I want the people to understand.

* Film
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* Palestinian film
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* Rashid Masharawi
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* From Ground Zero
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* No Other Land
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