From Ground Zero | 2025
A still from “Sorry Cinema,” a short film by Ahmed Hassouna in FROM GROUND ZERO. Courtesy of Watermelon Pictures.
While much of the media's coverage of Israel's war on Palestine has focused on Israel's perspective, framing the apartheid state as a perpetual victim and justifying or outright ignoring its crimes against humanity, it has fallen to Palestinians to tell their own stories.
It is telling that last year's best documentary, the searing No Other Land, still does not have a theatrical distributor in the United States despite widespread acclaim. Thankfully, From Ground Zero, Palestine's official submission to the 2025 Academy Awards is receiving a limited theatrical release and offers an look at the war from 22 Palestinian filmmakers who are there on the ground, capturing history as it happens.
The film tells 22 unique stories from Gaza in the wake of October 7, 2023. Some are narrative, some are documentary, and some are even animated, each bringing their own compelling perspective to a conflict where the input of Palestinians has been oft overlooked. As with any anthology film, some entries are naturally stronger than others, but seeing these 22 shorts collected here is quite sobering. There are tales of people mourning the life they once had, people trying to maintain a sense of normalcy amidst increasingly dire circumstances, and even a few filmmakers walking away from unfinished projects because the pressures are real life are too great, filmmaking suddenly seeming trivial in the wake of the unspeakable.
In one particularly haunting work, children write their names on their arms and legs so in case they are blown off in a missile attack, they can later be identified. That image is the one that stuck with me the most - the destruction of innocence that puts Israel's genocidal war in stark contrast against the prevailing Zionist narrative. Here amidst the rubble and the tent cities and the fragments of shattered lives strewn around like so much rubbish, these 22 filmmakers find stories that are universal in their humanity. While From Ground Zero isn't particularly concerned with providing a macro view of the conflict, its focus on the personal stories of Gaza provides a deeply human element to a conflict rife with heated rhetoric.
Some of the films are fatalistic, some are hopeful, and some even find small moments of joy amidst the rubble of their homeland. The film's impact, however, is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts - it's a harrowing portrait of human resilience from a painfully unrepresented perspective, allowing Palestinian artists to tell their stories and shine a light on the conflict's human toll. Each film, from the polished to the more hardscrabble, brings something unique to the table, and a perspective that refuses to be ignored.
