When Osama Al-Ashi approaches a young boy with a water tank, the boy has a question: why does a journalist need water? Osama explains that journalists are just like everyone else. They get thirsty, too.
Elsewhere in Citizen Osama, Ahmed Hassouna’s documentary about his friend in northern Gaza, a taxi driver refuses to take Osama because he is a journalist. Carrying him could make the car a target.
His job may define him to his neighbours, but to Osama himself, the basic necessities of life must come first. He has recently become a father, and finding milk or Cerelac for his baby can be as impossible as finding shelter. He dreams of being a filmmaker, but his camera is occupied with recording the devastation around him.
Hassouna’s film, which premiered this week at Venice Film Festival and is Palestine’s submission for the 2027 Oscars, follows him with patience and affection. Osama is an ideal lead: warm and humble, quick to laugh at a bad joke, and determined to keep working despite everything happening to him and the people he loves.
Many of the films about Gaza made since October 7 have concentrated on the early months of the war. Citizen Osama follows life further into last year, as hunger deepens and the repeated search for food, fuel and water consumes the days.
That life has continued beyond the film. Despite the ceasefire announced last October, families in Gaza still face violence, malnutrition and unsafe water. Hassouna remains there, and, speaking to him this week over Zoom, Hassouna describes contending with the same daily necessities we have watched his friend struggle to find.
While he remains off camera throughout, Hassouna stays with Osama between assignments and at home, lending us the intimacy of their friendship, allowing us time to appreciate Osama's gentleness and understand what keeps him going.
As friends and colleagues are killed, the film's intimacy make the losses even more painful. And each death also brings another reminder of the danger Osama faces whenever he leaves his family. His child depends on him coming home, while the people whose lives he documents depend on journalists such as him continuing to go out.
Hassouna keeps the editing sparse and the pacing measured, allowing us to observe how much work survival entails. Osama's family pick insects from the only flour they could find, long spoiled, discussing whether they can make an edible meal from it, asking people on the street if they have anything else to spare. As the struggle continues, we have the space to feel just how arduous these basic tasks truly are.
And some of the images, both of the relentless destruction and of life finding a way to go on, are among the most striking I have seen from Gaza. Towards the end, a man stands on the broken ledge of a high floor of a half-collapsed apartment building, trying to recover what he can. Perhaps that was once his home. We'll never know if his perilous search is about survival or sentiment — which is exactly what makes it linger.
Late in the film, a residential tower is destroyed in the distance. Osama explains that this loss feels different — it was where he began his career and his artistic work. To him, it is a reminder of the Gaza that once was, and of the man he once was too — the ambitions he had, the life he expected to build and the possibilities he has gradually had to let go.
The film, which opens with his son's birth, closes with his first birthday. His family gathers, marks the milestone with smiles and tries to make the day special. Life continues in these small acts of care, even as any greater hope for what comes next becomes harder to hold on to.
That sentiment runs through the whole film. Again and again, in increasingly desperate circumstances, people care for one another, lean on their families, loved ones, or even strangers and try to move through each day with dignity and respect for those around them.
Citizen Osama leaves little room for optimism about the catastrophe in Gaza. But, even at its most dire, it strengthens our hope for the people living through it, and reaffirms our belief in the basic human instinct to keep caring for one another, especially at our most desperate.
