Gaza
2018 · 19m · España
Directed by Carles Bover Martínez, Julio Pérez del Campo
Genres: documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, dark
After the bombings stop and the cameras leave, this documentary travels through Gaza's cities and people to show the blockade, the postwar ruins, and the daily human-rights violations its population endures.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight documentary about an obvious atrocity, which means it's working against every instinct I have—but Bover Martínez and Pérez del Campo refuse the expected emotional catharsis, instead letting the mundane aftermath *be* the horror, and that cold refusal to perform for us is genuinely disarming.
This sits firmly in the lineage of committed observational documentary—Kiarostami's spatial patience, the Dardenne brothers' commitment to duration over incident—where the formal choice to linger in ruins and routine becomes the ethical argument itself.
The decision to film *after* the spectacle ends, when the international press has moved on, reframes the entire documentary as an act of witness that's almost unbearably quiet—that structural constraint is what makes nineteen minutes feel like testimony rather than reportage.