Every story from Gaza is a record of what no human being should experience in a just world. We can conceptualise war, bombing and mass killing in the abstract. We are inundated with images of all three. But focus on the experience of any one person and comprehension begins to fail.
Who Is Still Alive, a documentary by Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff, presents nine such stories with almost all of those images stripped away. Wadimoff brought together nine Palestinians who had fled Gaza on a black sound stage in South Africa, where production moved after Swiss authorities denied the participants visas. There, he asked them to tell their stories directly to camera.
The few images of Gaza come from the participants’ phones – footage of a search through rubble for loved ones, and the last video of a younger brother before he was gone forever. For most of the film, however, Wadimoff reconstructs Gaza as an abstraction. The participants trace their homes in white on the black floor and stand within outlines representing the neighbourhoods where they once lived.
These are the moments when the film falters. The device calls attention to itself, pulling us out of their testimony and towards the contrivance of its presentation.
But when the participants speak, it becomes impossible to look away from Who Is Still Alive. Sometimes it is the smallest detail that breaks through. Fourteen-year-old Ghada Alabadla remembers that there was nothing she loved more than riding her bicycle, and the freedom she felt as she cycled through Gaza. Musician Feras Elshrafi recalls playing his qanun when a nearby building was bombed. He performs the piece again, then stops at the precise note at which the explosion interrupted him.
As tens of thousands of children are killed, we see the nadir of what humanity is capable of. But in their stories, we see its opposite, too.
Adel Al Taweel’s story is one such case. A visual artist born and raised in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, he was in Egypt when the war began. His family told him matter-of-factly to stay where he was. “At least one of us will carry on the family name,” his father said.
Instead, Al Taweel secretly returned to Gaza and made his way north to be with them, unable to leave his family to endure the siege alone. On the journey, he saw little but devastation. When he arrived, their house was the only one still standing in the area.
They remained there together, supporting one another and doing what they could to survive until the early months of 2024. When they heard bombs falling, Al Taweel would reassure his sister that they were safe: if she could hear the bomb, it was not coming for them. The dangerous ones were those they would never hear.
Then came the one they did not hear.
Al Taweel woke, confused, in a hospital bed. He was told that he had been pulled from a crater two metres deep, with two of his relatives dead beside him – his aunt clutching his niece in her arms. Still weak, he left the hospital that same day and returned to the rubble to search for his family. He found them, but none had survived.
Now, he lives in France. Perhaps his father will get his wish, and he can carry on the family name.
Making this film is an act of hope, but it is hard to call the film hopeful. It is certainly an act of defiance – refusing to be a statistic, refusing to allow tragedy to be forgotten. But there is no feel-good moment of catharsis in which it seems everything is going to be all right for them.
That felt even more true after the film ended, when one of the participants, Eman Shannan, answered questions from the audience during a screening at the Amman International Film Festival. She said she still had hope when they filmed it. She does not now.
Another detail she shared struck me. Shannan has so far refused to reunite with her surviving family. She cannot bear it. It has been three years since she saw them, she said. But even if they meet now, who knows whether they will ever be able to meet again?
The screening is accompanied by an exhibition at the Royal Film Commission – Jordan, featuring the table on which the participants drew their homes, and screens on which they tell their stories individually. The latter is powerful, allowing you to see the person standing before you and physically connecting you to their story.
Nearly three years into the devastation, the world’s perspective has shifted. There are seemingly few people left unaware of the tragedy taking place in Gaza. Thousands of stories continue there, each one of them unfathomable.
But it is our duty to keep locking into the details, refusing to compartmentalise or look away. And if the deaths become too much to bear, then think of the beauty of what Gaza was, the love shared between its people and the countless memories its survivors cherish.
Every story is remarkable. Each one is worth hearing in every vivid detail. And none of these people will forget why they loved this place so much. In heeding their calls to remember it, neither should we.
Who Is Still Alive is screening at the Amman International Film Festival, which runs until August 3
