Twenty-two real-life stories
fraught with suffering and a pervading sense of utter hopelessness: The film, From Ground Zero: Stories from
Gaza (2024), is a documentary in want of a solution that did not come
not only in 2024, but also in 2025. That Rashid Masharawi, the film’s director,
survived even the release of the film is remarkable. Israel clearly did not
want true stories from Gaza reaching the rest of the world even though it was not
as if the rest of us could miss the photos of the mass devastation throughout
Gaza and the resulting tent camps in 2025. It precisely because
societal-level figures, such as 65,000 or 75,000 civilians murdered and over a
million left starving and homeless, can be easily separated from the plights of
individuals and families on the ground that Masharawi’s film is so valuable. Juxtaposed
with the Gaza-wide statistics befitting the genocide and perhaps holocaust, the
22 stories in the film give the world a sense of what experiencing a holocaustic
genocide is really like.
The full essay is at "From Ground Zero."
