What does living look like in a place where vestiges of hope seem leached out? Exerting brutality of Israel바카라s war on Palestine finds expression and representation in the anthology From Ground Zero. Curated by director-producer Rashid Masharawi, the 22-odd films comb through experiences of children, men, women and artists.
The shorts are as brief as they can be, scraping at particular, everyday horrors. There바카라s no need to establish a large, epic span of narrative. That the civilians remain clutching onto resilience is in itself extraordinary. To live in a war zone is to endure artillery of violence, an assault that defies imagination. Your senses are numbed. Ears start ringing with the pervasive noise of drones, long after they have vanished from the sky. People wear headphones to block out the sound, real and imagined. Privacy stands forfeited. The act of dreaming gets stranded between the delusional and vital self-sustenance. What is dignity if it is pushed out into crevices of bare survival? In Sorry, Cinema, director Ahmad Hassunah wistfully talks about being unable to create fiction films. He couldn바카라t even travel with the one he managed to make. As the situation in his home country tightened, filmmaking itself had to be abandoned. Now life is a marathon, he says, of escaping bombs, rubble. Days are spent chasing spare mercies of aid planes, scouring for food for his family. Flour tumbled off vehicles is scrounged off the ground.
In No Signal, a man is insistent his relative is buried under rubble is alive, while he is gently pulled away from confronting the horror of witnessing. Elsewhere, in another short, a girl is left alone to fend for herself with scores of family members lost to violence. The earliest segment circles a woman revisiting her abandoned home. There seems no way of going back, her like most around her put up in refugee camps. She wears makeup to hide signs of insomnia. How does one grieve and remember all that one has lost? Amidst the constant carnage, there바카라s no room for contained mourning; deaths and devastation are paraded in quick succession. Comprehension is bombarded to smithereens. To retain one바카라s senses and sensitivity from regular annihilation is a task with no end in sight.
The anthology wisely recognizes bouts of seeming absurdity within the circumstances. In Nidal Damo-directed Everything is Fine, a featured stand-up comedian is particular about taking a shower in a makeshift stall before heading out to perform on the streets. Creating their accounts of survival is a bold, brilliant form of resistance. These films hit viscerally, the immediacy of engagement stinging and vital. The camerawork may be shaky, the leaps across the segments awkward and hasty frequently but the few minutes we are granted with each voice sharing their tattered world stir a depth of emotion and experience.
The quest is to hold onto hope and grace. 바카라I reject despair바카라, a girl who fronts one of the segments asserts. We must sing songs of joy and hope. Without them, you can바카라t carry on. Once you let yourself be swept into the fog of bleakness, how can a path out of it be forged? From Ground Zero is an unnerving, messy and uncompromising act of witness. It laser-directs its indictments right into the heart of passive observer consciousness. Everyday in a war zone, one바카라s efforts to weave art is blasted. In Basel El Maquosi바카라s Fragments, a girl laments her half-ruined installation for an art exhibition. To any viewer of Ground Zero, this artwork believed to have its course cut short nevertheless gets indelibly inscribed.
