“We make fires with plastic and drink unsweetened tea. One day we will die from inhaling the smoke.” Mohamed and his wife are preparing something to drink in front of their tent. Planted on one of the thousands of roofs full of rubble that make up the current postcard of the Gaza Strip. A roof that overlooks a ruined city, gray and impregnated with dust and pain. To a city that before, despite the blockade and intermittent attacks by the Israeli Army, enjoyed hospitals, universities and life, and that had become an indescribable exception. But now that city in the Palestinian enclave, where Mohamed appears drinking unsweetened tea, is a pile of ruins.
This scene is just one more of those that make up the film. ‘We are all Gaza’directed and produced by journalists Hernan Zin (Argentina) and Yousef Hammash (Gaza) and candidate for best documentary film at the Goya Awards which is celebrated this Saturday in Barcelona. It is a crude and at times painful documentary that, this Thursday, during a discussion in the Mooby Aribau room, the Argentine filmmaker defined as “the biggest challenge” of his life.
And it’s no wonder. Because starting from its production, it is completely different from his other films such as ‘Born in Syria’ (2016), ‘Dying to tell’ (2018) or ‘Born in Gaza’ (2014) – the latter, essential to explain his new work – due to the impossibility of moving to the Palestinian enclave to film and carry out this project. Not because he and his team did not do everything possible to travel, but because the Government of the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu bans media entry to Gazan territory.
710 days of war
Even with this, thanks to a team of Palestinian journalists working in the Strip, ‘We are all Gaza’ manages to convey with absolute clarity pain and suffering of those who have lived through the bloody Israeli offensive. 710 days in which he follows Mohamed, Bisan and Udai: three of the children – now not so children anymore – who starred in the documentary ‘Born in Gaza’ and who 11 years later see their present and future changed again.
All with different motivations, but under the same threat and uncertainty. Mohamed thinks about getting his family away from danger; Bisan, to one day reach university; and Udai, in which the war ends so that he can one day marry his partner, with whom he has only lived in dark times. Because although on the tape it is heard that In war there is no time for love, Actually the documentary says the opposite.
The film takes the viewer to the enclave. He makes a story where there are no filterswhere at times it is difficult to keep your gaze; and in others it is inevitable not to remove it. An “extraordinarily complicated” visual portrait that “speaks of the best and worst of the human condition” and that includes scenes of tremendous crudeness. like him bombing of Al Aqsa hospital that left the image of a man burning and trapped in the rubble; the duel of the more than 70,000 fatalities during the last two years, or the incessant fall of missiles that have turned Gaza into an almost uninhabitable wasteland.
All this makes up a movie that hurts. How uncomfortable and that functions as a loudspeaker for a people still harassed by violence today. A documentary that, although it does not provide new information about the war in Gaza, does show a barely explored perspective from the core of the enclave and from the heart of the Palestinian people in the Strip.
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