feeling listless

Film Sometimes documentaries hurt too much to be watchable, and Gaza Strip is an example. This is the story of the children living the occupied areas who relate their daily existence through sensitive interviews and showing the viewer aspects of their lives. Unsurprisingly they ruminate on death; at the age of thirteen they talk about how they’re not afraid of dying, how they want to by martyrs to the cause. But behind their tough words, in their eyes all you can see is fear. In one moment, a child sits in a barely furnished room and describes the conversation he will have with God when he dies. Even here he finds little comfort as everything he has done in his life to survive physically and spiritually is not enough in the maker’s eyes. He can see no hope for himself. In the closing moments their homes are bulldozed, but tents are soon up in the rubble, in defiance and necessity.

It isn’t an easy film. There is a larger narrative at play, but mainly we see images and ideas. But is difficult to follow in places; although a scrolling message appears at the start it doesn’t add enough context to what we are seeing. It’s similar in many ways to Marc Singer's Dark Days about the people living under New York. But in that film a disembodied voice explained what we were seeing, placed it in context and made the ‘story’ more affecting. Here, as tragic moments pass, a viewer with only a smattering of priory knowledge of the situation would find it difficult to understand why things are happening, how the people are in this terrible situation. Cleverly then, the film demands that the watcher learns more of their own accord, perhaps with a view to revisiting the film with this new found context. Until then we sit in utter amazement that the film was made at all.