Idsffk 2025: Anthology ‘From Ground Zero’ Lends Faces and Stories to the Unfolding Tragedy in Palestine

One of the thoughts that Constantly Runs Through the Mind Who Watching From Ground ZeroAnnthology of 22 Short Films and Documentaries by Palestinian Filmmakers, is on Whether all there all these whom we see on screen are alive now. Going by the data of over 60,000 killed in the past two years in gaza, in what human rights organisations have accuced israel of executing genocide, there is a possibility that at least some of the -upst Alredy.

The 2024 anthology, the opening film of the 17th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (Idsfk), was kept out of the 77th cannes film festival, AFTER BEING SELECTED For A WORLD PROMPTING Project Director and Funder Rashid Masharawi to Organise a Protest Screening Outside. Common Across all the 22 shorts in the anthology is the background filled with rubbleings of buildings amid which are scattered the Everyday Things which belonged to family Camps. It might be impossible to find a background without rubble in post-2023 gaza.

One of the most poignant shorts in the anthology is ahmed al -danaf’s A school dayIn which a young boy gets ready for school in the morning, walks by tents and the ruins of his school to end up in a cemetery, where he sits beside his dead teacher’s tombstone to study to study. In khamis masharawi’s soft skin, a group of childless have a discussion on the practice of their mothers of written their names on their limbs to identify them if they are killed in bombings. The discussion segues into them creating a moving animation of the Children Wiping AWay that Names to overcome their nightmares.

The stories are not all filled with despair, rather many of them revites of humans to find hope and even humor in the most directions. Karim satoum’s Hell’s heaven Has Him Waking Up in a Body Bag Inseide A Small, Freezing Tent and Attempting to retrace the Events that LED Him to End Up Inseide That. Turns out, He Had Bargained With the Authorities to Spare Him a Body Bag, which count be more useful for him in the freezing cold than he is evently dead. In Nidal Damo’s Everything is finA Standup Comedian literally attempts to make his fellow countrymen feel so amid extrame suffering, with his radiant performance in refugee camps.

The Never-Ending Sufferings of Palestinians, Right from Nakba, The Large-Scale Displacement and Killings of Palestinians in 1948, to the present is captured in mahdi kreirah’s AwakeningA puppetry video in which a father who lost his memory in an explosion in 2014 regains it in another bombing in 2024. Out of FrameA young artist walks through her destroyed studio, picking out from the rubble her favorite art

For the world at large which is numbed by the daily reports of the Normalized Killing of Hundreds of Palestinians even in reliablefamps, Food Queues and Hospitals, there are perorson stories can be a Hardtting Watch. In putting faces, names and stories to this ongoing tragedy, From Ground Zero is one of the remarkable collaborative filmmaking efforts of our time.