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‘From Ground Zero’ Review: Palestine’s Oscar Entry Compiles 22 Video Diaries From Gaza
'From Ground Zero' presents slices of life (and death) from the front lines of Gaza, compiled by filmmakers under siege.
In “ From Ground Zero,” Palestine’s entry for the Oscars’ international feature film category, 22 directors present cinematic diaries from Gaza, shot in between (and sometimes, during) IDF bombing raids to weave a portrait of life under siege. In fact, their variety is the point, as each one depicts a different facet of social and personal life in its creators’ vicious new realities, whether they deal with death in the abstract — as in Kareem Satoum’s absurd “Hell’s Heaven,” in which a man sleeps in a body bag for comfort — or with grief as their new normal. The artists may have been exposed to cruel new extremes, but their sense of confinement, and their familiarity with war, goes back years — if not decades — a subject broached in poetic fashion by Mahdi Karirah’s haunting concluding chapter “Awakening,” told with marionettes made of scraps.
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