Reporting From the Rubble

In Ahmed Hassouna’s Gaza chronicle “Al Mowaten Osama” (“Citizen Osama”), a journalist becomes the story. Ignoring warnings to evacuate in mid-2024, independent reporter Osama Al-Ashi remains in northern Gaza to record the human toll of Israel’s assault. The result is a sobering portrait of everyday struggles under constant bombardment. We watch helplessly but engaged as Al-Ashi balances the dangers of his profession with new fatherhood and the harrowing search for necessities. In a taut and focused 69 minutes, the documentary — Palestine’s official entry to the Academy Awards — is a streamlined portrait of life under siege, and the ethical dilemmas born of needing to document history as it unfolds.

While director Hassouna shot plenty of the footage — such as the scenes of Al-Ashi scavenging for food — vital pieces are captured by the reporter himself, in real time. The film opens with the view from a camera affixed to Al-Ashi’s bulletproof vest, which shows the DSLR camera he’s holding in his outstretched hands as he runs toward the site of an airstrike. The scene shudders with adrenaline, scored only by its subject’s desperate breath. It’s terrifying to watch. In his previous life, Al-Ashi was an art photographer, but his framing here is necessarily chaotic. Yet even under the pressures of capturing carnage as it happens, his images are deeply evocative: light streams into the darkened spaces of collapsed infrastructure; people flock heroically to assist the injured with little care for their own safety. Perhaps this is the demand of making art from atrocity: finding meaning in the grotesque. We see Al-Ashi welcome his newborn son and spend time with his wife and parents. But the search for beauty amid Israel’s flattening of entire neighborhoods becomes harder as the film goes on.

The film is colored by the possibility of witnessing a loved one’s death.

The scenes with Al-Ashi’s fellow journalists range from laugh-out-loud funny to agonizingly desolate. Every time they gather, it seems, they learn of another colleague who has been killed. One such revelation occurs in real time, as Al-Ashi sprints toward the scene of a strike, following a trail of blood only to discover the victim was a friend. Usually, such news reaches Al-Ashi from afar.

From that point on, the film is colored by the possibility of witnessing a loved one’s death. Whenever Al-Ashi rushes to a collapsed building or flaming vehicle, the potential for personal tragedy looms. His wife and parents warn him that each time he steps outside with his camera could be his last. And although Hassouna doesn’t appear on screen, his authorial presence can be felt within this worry for what might become of Al-Ashi — his close personal friend — as he collects images from ongoing shelling.

There’s not much attention paid to chronology or politics. Aside from a public celebration of a brief ceasefire, and Al-Ashi’s son turning 1 year old, time is collapsed into an endless barrage of bombings and of massive crates of aid that pose their own dangers when airdropped. It is as if the act of witnessing and recording the reality of genocide is context enough. As trucks of bodies ride past Al-Ashi’s lens, the dead are referred to using a word that has become familiar to the English-speaking world: “shaheed.” Presented in English subtitle, the word is “martyr,” a common refrain in images from Gaza, though the meaning of its Arabic phrasing gets lost in translation. Primarily, it means “witness” — in this case, someone who testifies to the word of God — but its repetition throughout the film becomes an eerie reminder of Al-Ashi’s place in the grand scheme of things.

While reporting on the Israeli attacks in Gaza, journalist Osama Al-Ashi must also provide for the daily needs of his family in “Citizen Osama.” (Coorigines Production)

As Al-Ashi searches for affordable fuel, burns books for warmth and sifts through rotten flour to rid it of worms, the camera remains running. In bearing witness to carnage and allowing the camera to be turned on himself, Al-Ashi exists on both sides of martyrdom — a living witness and a dead man walking — a distinction which extends to Hassouna too, who braves the worst of the occupation alongside his subject.

Each migration of people between north and south Gaza becomes an exodus of religious significance. When they safely return, it’s a homecoming worthy of celebration, and Al-Ashi’s camera captures their defiant joy in the face of annihilation. In just over an hour, “Citizen Osama” captures the breadth of human experience, a tale told by an ordinary artist forced to take on extraordinary journalistic duty.

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