From Ground Zero (2024) Review: Gaza in Its Own Words

Is From Ground Zero worth watching?

Yes. From Ground Zero is an urgent and often surprising anthology that lets people in Gaza describe their own lives under bombardment, and its range of voices gives it a power no single film could match. The best segments are intimate, specific and, at times, unexpectedly funny, which makes the grief around them hit harder. The reservation is inherent in the format: quality varies from piece to piece, and some shorts feel more like raw testimony than finished films.

What is From Ground Zero about?

From Ground Zero is a collection of 22 short films made by Palestinian filmmakers living in Gaza during the war that followed the attacks of October 7, 2023. Each short captures a slice of life under bombardment: the daily struggle for basic necessities, the effort to keep routines and creativity alive, and the work of making sense of loss while the war continues around the filmmakers.

The segments vary widely in form. Some are observational documentary, some are staged fiction, and others take more experimental or playful approaches, so the anthology moves between registers rather than following a single narrative line. The result is less a report on the war than a mosaic of personal perspectives, with each filmmaker choosing what to show and how.

The project was initiated by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, and Reema Mahmoud is among the credited filmmakers. It is an Arabic-language production from Palestine, and the full anthology runs 117 minutes.

A mosaic rather than a message

The anthology’s greatest strength is plurality. Instead of one argument, it offers many small, particular experiences, and that refusal to flatten Gaza into a single image is itself a statement. A piece rooted in the practical business of getting through a day can sit beside one built on memory, fantasy or a moment of absurd humour. The accumulation is overwhelming in a way a conventional documentary rarely manages.

The humour deserves emphasis because it is so unexpected. Several filmmakers find a dry, dark comedy in their circumstances, and those moments do not soften the horror so much as reveal the resilience and irony people use to survive it. They also make the film feel like the work of artists rather than simply the product of a catastrophe.

Filmmaking under impossible conditions

These films were made in the middle of the war, by people living through displacement and loss themselves, and the conditions of production are visible in every frame. Shaky footage, harsh light and improvised sound become part of the texture, and the film never pretends otherwise. That immediacy gives even the rougher segments a charge that polished filmmaking could not replicate.

It also means the viewer is watching filmmakers insist on authorship. Each short carries a sense of someone deciding how their own story should be told, which gives the anthology a dignity that goes beyond its news value.

Where the anthology stumbles

Twenty-two shorts in 117 minutes means some segments barely have time to register before the next begins, and the transitions can feel abrupt. A few pieces lean on familiar imagery that viewers of news coverage will have seen many times, and they add less than the more personal or formally inventive entries. The shifts in tone, while deliberate, can also be disorienting; this is a film to absorb in pieces rather than to follow as a story.

Who should watch From Ground Zero?

It matters most to viewers who want to hear from Palestinians in Gaza directly, for audiences interested in documentary and anthology forms, and for anyone who believes cinema can bear witness. It is emotionally demanding, and it helps to watch with time afterwards to reflect. The film includes images of destruction, injury, death and grief, including their effect on children, so it is best suited to adults and older teenagers.

Related films worth your time:

• To a Land Unknown, a fiction feature about Palestinian refugees trying to build lives elsewhere.
• All That’s Left of You, a family drama that traces Palestinian history across generations.
• Capernaum, Nadine Labaki’s drama about childhood amid poverty and displacement in Beirut.

The verdict

From Ground Zero is not a polished film, and it does not try to be. Its uneven segments and abrupt shifts are the cost of an extraordinary undertaking, and the finest pieces make it one of the most necessary films about the war in Gaza.

Rating: 4/5