Gauze
2025 · 8m · France
Directed by Noran Fikri Alezabi, Xinyue Ma, Yulin Yu
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Fourteen-year-old Zain, a Palestinian swimming champion, becomes the sole caregiver to his little brother amid war and man-made famine.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects war cinema to *declaim* its politics; Gauze does something weirder—it narrows the frame to a kid's chlorine-soaked routine while everything collapses, which somehow feels more subversive than any manifesto could.
The film's restraint in the face of maximalist subject matter demonstrates formal control that recalls the best of contemporary humanitarian cinema—economical editing, refusal of sentimentality, and a compositional awareness that treats the mundane as monument.
The decision to anchor the entire 8 minutes around Zain's body in water—the one space where his agency remains intact—turns a premise about loss into something about resistance, and it's achieved through nothing but framing and performance discipline.