Home Movies Gaza introduces the Gaza Strip as a microcosm of civilization's failure. Seeking to portray everyday life in a place where even the most basic human rights remain out of reach, it adopts a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complex, derelict, and inseparable from its political identity. (This film is screened with Morning Circle and Old Masters.)

Home movies conventionally record the private memories and everyday moments of a family. In Home Movies Gaza, however, “home” is no longer a safe interior. One of Basma al-Sharif’s major works, the film uses the most intimate of spaces—the home—to reveal how everyday life in Gaza is embedded within structures of surveillance and violence. Landscapes of ruin and fracture, together with the sound of unseen drones, evoke a condition of oppression that has become the very background of ordinary life.
By adopting the form of the home movie, the film paradoxically captures the reality of a place where home movies can no longer fully exist. Inside a damaged house, the intact preservation of private memory has become impossible. The camera therefore turns outward, toward a landscape inscribed with historical wounds that exceed any single life.
Moving beyond familiar images that consume catastrophe as spectacle, al-Sharif develops a challenging cinematic form attentive instead to the traces of life that persist after destruction.

• Screenplay Basma al-SHARIF
• Cinematography Basma al-SHARIF
• Edit Basma al-SHARIF
• Cast Lama ALSHURAFA

Basma al-SHARIF | Basma al-SHARIF | basmalsharif@gmail.com