From Ground Zero (2024)

What sets this film, made during the war, apart is that the filmmaker documents what is happening amid displacement and under bombardment, among people struggling to stay alive and to find food and water for their families. These are the very people who will make the film themselves, which is where its name comes from. It contains true stories: queues for water, bread, and phone charging; the camera entering the heart of a tent; a mother writing her children’s names on their tender skin so their identities will not be lost if death catches them unawares; and the story of Karim, who sleeps in a burial shroud to keep warm in the cold of night. There are also stories of searching beneath the rubble, which return in vivid scenes and in nightmares told by children. In Alaa Damo’s film “24 Hours,” a survivor appears to share his testimony about being rescued from beneath the rubble three times in a single day. In Islam Al-Zurai'i’s “Flashback,” a teenage girl tells how her home was bombed while she was inside, and how the scene returns to her every day in her dreams. Defying the trauma and the buzzing of the “zanana” drone circling overhead, she puts on headphones and dances on a rooftop with her cat.