Who Is Still Alive, a documentary in which nine survivors of the assault on Gaza tell their stories was supposed to be filmed in director Nicolas Wadimoff’s home country of Switzerland. But when the participants were refused Swiss visas, Wadimoff and his team were left scrambling to get the film made.
They found a solution in South Africa, where they had only 10 days to prepare a new shoot. There, on a black sound stage, nine Palestinians traced the outlines of their homes on the floor and spoke about the lives they had left behind.
Now, Switzerland has chosen Who Is Still Alive as its official submission for the Academy Award for best international feature film. That has left Wadimoff with another challenge: how to build an Oscar campaign around a film that asks its audience to listen to nine people recount what they have lost – and to stay with them through the silences when they cannot find the words.
“We have no stars, we have no actors or actresses,” Wadimoff tells The National. “So we are going to run this campaign with the tools that we have and the tool that we have is humanity.”
Earlier this month, the director held a private screening in Dubai for potential supporters. He is also preparing to travel to Los Angeles, where he hopes to raise more money and introduce the film to Academy members.
Switzerland offered some financial support after selecting Who Is Still Alive, he says, but the filmmakers were told they would need to find additional funding. It is the first Oscar campaign for Wadimoff, who has made documentaries for more than three decades, and he is still learning what it will take to reach voters.
For the director, the campaign is particularly significant because it will take the film to the US, whose government has played a central role in the war.
“Anything that can help to raise the voices of the protagonists of the film, but also of the Palestinians from Gaza, I think is important and relevant,” he says. “I would take any opportunity to make those voices heard.”
The film is one of the many international submissions competing for a place on the Academy’s shortlist in December, ahead of the announcement of the five nominees the following month.
The Swiss selection
The film’s journey began with plans for a three-week shoot at the Vidy Theatre in Lausanne. There would be coaches for the children and psychologists to support the participants, Wadimoff later told French literary and current affairs journal Esprit. When Swiss authorities refused the visas, he and his team initially thought they wouldn't be able to make the film at all.
Wadimoff understands why Switzerland’s Oscars selection might appear contradictory. He highlights the country’s association with international humanitarian law, while expressing concern that its foreign policy has taken a different course on Palestine. The Federal Office of Culture, which selected the film, followed its own path, he says.
“It was seen by the media as a kind of opposition between the government which didn’t give the visas to the Palestinians to make the film and the government which chose the film for the Oscars,” he says. “But this is what Switzerland is. There are many different opinions on what’s going on in the same country and they coexist together.”
He is cautious about what the selection might say about a wider change in Swiss policy. It could be seen, he suggests, as a move towards the country’s human-rights tradition, although he does not know whether such a shift is taking place.
Wadimoff has spent much of his career trying to bring Palestinian stories to audiences in Switzerland and beyond. His first visit came in 1988, during the First Intifada, when he was close in age to the young Palestinians he met. He returned over the years to see friends and work on films, including the documentaries Aisheen: Still Alive in Gaza and The Apollo of Gaza.
What surprised him, he says, was how far the people he knew seemed from the way Palestinians were portrayed abroad. His friends had different backgrounds and opinions, and loved to argue about politics. Yet when he returned to Switzerland, he would find that many people saw Palestinians as though they were all the same.
“I tried all the time to fill this gap with stories,” he says. “Just telling stories which are not told most of the time. I’m not the only one to do this. Palestinians do it all the time.”
The time to listen
Wadimoff first met the participants between March and May 2024. By the time they came together in South Africa that October, they had spent months living with the Israel-Hamas war and the uncertainty of whether they would ever return.
He gave each person several hours to speak, sitting opposite them and listening through an interpreter. Their conversations were divided into broad periods: life before the war, what happened during it and what might come afterwards. Beyond that, he says, he did not know what they would choose to share.
“My main goal at that time was simple. It was to give them space to exist,” he says. “Take the space, take the time. It’s for you now.”
The finished film contains long pauses in which participants struggle to continue. Wadimoff says there were moments when he thought it had become too painful and offered to stop. The participants would tell him they needed a few moments before carrying on.
“I wanted to stop sometimes and they said, ‘No, no. Give me just five seconds or 20 or one minute, and I will start again.’”
On the first day, he says, the crew realised they would need tissues on set. They bought boxes and placed them throughout the room. After a participant had finished speaking, the group would embrace and cry together before taking a break and beginning again.
Wadimoff says he was hearing their accounts for the first time alongside the rest of the crew, not knowing what to expect.
Some of the most affecting moments come through the details of a life interrupted. Fourteen-year-old Ghada Alabadla remembers the freedom she felt riding her bicycle through Gaza. Musician Feras Elshrafi recalls playing his qanun when a nearby building was bombed. He performs the piece again, stopping at the precise note at which the explosion interrupted him.
Visual artist Adel Al Taweel was in Egypt when the war began. His family told him to stay there, but he secretly returned to Gaza, unable to leave them to endure the siege alone.
When they heard bombs falling, he would reassure his sister that they were safe. If she could hear a bomb, it was not coming for them, he told her. The dangerous ones were those they would never hear.
Then came the one they did not hear. Al Taweel woke in hospital and was told he had been pulled from a crater, with two relatives dead beside him. Still weak, he returned to the rubble of the family home to search for his loved ones, and found they had been killed.
The participants do not always agree when they speak to one another about their experiences or what might come next. Wadimoff says he never expected them to think alike; he had spent too many years listening to his Palestinian friends debate with one another.
“I was not surprised that they would disagree and that they would have so many different opinions,” he says. “For me, it’s just normal.”
The first cut of the film ran to four hours and included more of the participants’ memories of their lives before the war. Wadimoff shortened it for festivals and cinemas, while some of that material became part of an accompanying installation.
Even in its final form, he says, the film asks audiences to spend longer with its subjects than they might be accustomed to spending with images of Gaza in the news or on social media. He hopes that time allows viewers to form a connection with the people on screen.
“I know it’s not very commercial, I know it’s not very spectacular,” he says. “But we need time to empathise with them. This is what the film really has: the time that we give to the voices.”
What happened to hope
Throughout, the film contains conversations about hope and whether it is possible to hold on to it. At the Amman International Film Festival screening, participant Eman Shannan spoke to the audience afterwards. She said she had still felt hope when it was made, but no longer did.
Shannan also said she had not reunited with her surviving family, despite not seeing them for three years. The prospect was too painful: if they met, she could not know whether they would ever be able to see one another again.
When Wadimoff first met the group, he says, many believed the war would end soon and that they would be able to return to Gaza, even if much of it had been destroyed. That expectation was still present when they filmed in October 2024.
“The question of hope, which is addressed in the film, would not have been the same one year later,” he says.
Wadimoff remains in regular contact with the participants, although he is careful about speaking for them. He believes they feel a responsibility to hold on to hope for the future of Palestinians as a people, even if they struggle to imagine better days in their own lives.
“I think they have contradictory feelings,” he says. “If they think about themselves now, I’m not sure they can imagine really good days coming. But I think they are thinking for the next generation.”
