Your film appears as a collective work, the pooling of images, stories and testimonies from Gaza to elaborate a portrait of the genocide as seen from the inside. I would like for you to tell us about the process of this collective work, regarding the people who filmed in Gaza as well as the editing and writing teams.
Everything started after the death of Refaat Alareer, in December of 2023. Before the extent and the duration of the massacres in Gaza, I felt powerless, but I perceived the movement of images was different from other genocides left invisible (like in Iraq for example), and that it was cinema’s job to go on with this task. I wrote to several Gazans I followed on social media, asking them if they were OK with me using their images. Most of them agreed. I built a stash from videos archived for months and ones my correspondents in Gaza would send. I watched close to 300 hours of genocide. My desire was to return a perceptible duration to what was happening there. The brevity of Instagram reels did not allow to truly understand the scope of this violence.
Hana Albayaty, who had worked for several years on the genocide in Iraq, helped me understand the political and historical stakes. Since most of the footage I would receive was in Arabic, she also assembled a translation team in Cairo, to help me understand what I was editing, but also to translate some of the exchanges with the Gazans. Fred Piet finalised the image edit, and made a very strong sound edit from the sound received. Simultaneously, I wrote the voice over, with the help of three friends—Christine Merville, Valérie Massadian and Oncléo—who each left their beautiful mark in the text. Loupio Dolla filmed the Mediterranean sea to trace the link between Gaza and us. The film is entirely self-produced, voluntarily made, as commitment for Palestine.
The voice over and the Refaat Alareer poems accompany the Gaza stories, continuously exploring the limits of what words and images can convey within tragedy. I wanted to know how speech, writing and poetry participated in composing the film during the editing phase.
To me the voice over was the sine qua non condition to legitimate my place in the film. I am not Palestinian, I do not live in Gaza. Therefore it felt necessary for me to talk about where I am from to show these images, necessary also to interrogate our Western gazes on these images, but also on the way they reach us, cross-cut by social media ads and selfies, if they are not simply censored. I think cinema should question more often our relation to this surge of images, to what persists in our imaginary.
The film is a testimony showcasing the urgency and the strength of the images when you feel powerless before the violence of the genocide. Could you share your thoughts on this matter today, as the brutality persists and the images of suffering accumulate?
Since we finished editing, the violence in Gaza has not stopped. The film feels obsolete already. But To Gaza was never thought as a news film: it is a testimony for history, a message in a bottle, for those who, later, will wonder: how did people survive in Gaza during the genocide?
Interview by Margot Mecca
