In the summer of 2014 confrontations between the Israel Defence Forces and Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza escalated into a seven-week war in which around 2,100 Palestinians and 90 Israelis were killed, the third in less than a decade.
Born in Gaza, filmed during and after this latest war, tells this story through the eyes of children living there.
The director Hernan Zin’s choice to place children as central narrators underscores the brutality that even the most innocent have to bear in Gaza. In some of the film’s most difficult moments, a group of boys revisit the beach where they had been playing football when four of their cousins were killed by Israeli shelling. The boys who survived have been left with crippling trauma. One, Hamada, indicates the shrapnel left in his chest; another, Montazar, suffers from hysterical fits and suicidal thoughts.
