Palestinian filmmakers are doing the impossible to capture their stories

January 14, 2025

Matt Minton

A young girl listens to music in her headphones while the sound of missiles and bombs destroys 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.

The film was recently named to the Oscars shortlist for Best International Film, representing Palestine, alongside No Other Land in 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, 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 the Palme d’Or for his documentary [Fahrenheit 9/11]. Michael 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 names on their hands. 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.