‘From Ground Zero’ Review: A Vital Testament to Palestinian Resilience

Palestine’s submission to the 2025 Oscars is a miraculous act of creativity amidst unimaginable circumstances.

Watermelon Pictures

The epic [is] for Israelis and the documentary for Palestinians.” That’s how legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is said to have wryly described Palestinian cinema — as being confined by its political reality to capturing only that reality.

In the weeks following October 2023 — the period in which From Ground Zero was shot — that political reality was the starkest it had been in decades. Much of the movie, a collection of 22 short films shot in the Gaza Strip by directors and crews undergoing deadly Israeli bombardment, reflects that. Death hovers over the film from the outset; in the very first chapter, “Selfie,” director Reema Mahmoud shows us footage of her niece being pulled out of the bombed wreckage of her home — the only member of her family to survive. With each film (nearly all soundtracked by the ominous buzz of a drone circling above), the death count grows: one director’s brother is killed; a young girl describes being trapped under rubble for hours and emerging an orphan; a dazed young man survives the third attack of 24 hours, only to plunge straight back into danger in a desperate, tragically unsuccessful attempt to rescue his parents.

Yet for all the harrowing echoes in From Ground Zero’s stories, the films are all distinctive. That’s partly because each one is infused with such obvious personal feeling that no one story sounds the same, whatever crushing details they may share. But it’s also because the filmmakers opt for such diversity of form (stop-motion, puppetry, experimental) and tone (urgent reportage, aching introspection, pitch-black comedy).

Take Kareem Satoum’s Elia Suleiman-esque chapter “Hell’s Heaven” as an example: in this film, a young man (played by Satoum himself) is so exhausted he can’t bring himself to think about anything but finding a blanket so he can take a nap. After a fruitless search, he settles for a white plastic body bag pocketed at the morgue; when a man chastises him for taking it, he quips that, if he’s killed, he’ll be given one anyway, so he may as well “enjoy it” while he’s alive.

Ahmed Hassouna’s “Sorry, Cinema” is another standout. A prize-winning director pre-war, he speaks directly to the medium he’s put so much energy into in a moving voiceover: “Forgive me cinema. I’ll put the camera aside and run with the others […] For the moment, I’ll abandon you.” His filmmaker’s eye is still clearly at work, though: he shows us surreally horrific sights, like a woman running from an explosion, her children trailing behind her while she screams in disturbing staccato bursts, as if trying repeatedly to purge the terror from her body. Despite the chapter’s rueful title and its symbolic final images — a clapboard being destroyed for firewood — it’s clear that neither Hassouna nor cinema have abandoned each other.

There’s a similar sense of paradox in Etimmad Washah’s “Taxi Wanissa.” The short begins as a Bresson-esque tale of one of Gaza’s donkeys (the titular Wanissa, who ferries displaced people from their tents to the market). This is interrupted by an abrupt cut to director Washah herself. Addressing us directly, Washah explains her plan for the ending of the movie, but tells us that filming was cut short — her brother and his children were killed, and she was left crushed by grief. “I lost the desire to continue the film,” she says. “I could only finish it with my testimony.”

To call the moment powerful is an understatement; the same is true of From Ground Zero in its entirety. That the filmmakers featured here found the wherewithal to shoot anything at all while displaced and under heavy bombardment is astonishing enough — that some of the directors managed to turn Godard’s quote on its head is pure miracle, as moving a testament to cinema itself and the human ability to create as any. Vitality and resilience amidst unimaginable circumstances — as one succinctly named chapter puts it, the deeply moving From Ground Zero is a resounding “no” against all odds.