Wistful, heartbreaking, yet defiantly hopeful, From Ground Zero is Palestine’s official submission to the 2025 Academy Awards—a cinematic cry for humanity from a people enduring the unendurable.

Conceived by legendary Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi and executive produced by Michael Moore, this anthology brings together dozens of emerging Palestinian artists in a bold, urgent act of storytelling. Each short film—ranging from 3 to 6 minutes—offers a raw, intimate glimpse into life in Gaza today, capturing the fractured beauty, the pain, and the persistence of a people under siege, facing extreme hunger, systemic destruction and relentless bombings.

Spanning genres from fiction and documentary to animation, docu-fiction, and experimental cinema, From Ground Zero presents a kaleidoscope of narratives. These stories pulse with grief and grit, sorrow and soul, joy and resistance—unflinching portraits of a homeland scarred but not silenced.

More than a collection of films, From Ground Zero is a time capsule of lived experience—an urgent response to a catastrophe still unfolding. It resists the reduction of lives to headlines or statistics, insisting instead on the humanity of those who remain: the mothers, the artists, the children, the dreamers.

Pulled out from the 2024 Cannes lineup after initially being accepted, the project stands as a testament to the power of art in the face of political suppression. Against all odds, it proclaims that the voice of Palestine—through film, through memory, through art—is not only alive, but unignorable.