This film emerges from my intimate connection to Kibbutz Nir Oz and the Western Negev landscape. I arrived there as a teenager and found a home, an extended family, that has stayed with me throughout my life. Although I have not lived there for many years, this place is still a part of me. The deaths of my friends, the burned-down houses, and the destruction of the kibbutz compelled me to begin filming without a clear plan, perhaps as a way to process the unthinkable.
I wandered and filmed the fields I once worked, and others: the breadbasket of Israel. They are now military zones, emptied of residents, demolished by war machinery. My mind and emotions resist reconciling the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in this landscape. I am filled with grief and rage.
While filming, I keep asking whether it is possible to find the right distance for cinematic work. What perspective would make a film possible in this situation? I realise I need a partner.
I turn to Ariel, a close friend who lives in Paris, and ask him to accompany me from afar. Perhaps somewhere between our two points of view, a path will emerge.
I regularly send him footage of the border fence and the villages beside it, always visible on the horizon, though unapproachable for now. This troubles Ariel and angers him; how can we speak about Gaza and the disaster unfolding there from such a removed position?
I agree, although I am not sure my camera could capture the inferno of Gaza. How can one show human suffering caused by war when it is so close, yet beyond the fence? I continue to search.
Bombardments shake the ground. Planes fly overhead. Tanks move in and out of the Gaza Strip. Drones buzz in the sky twenty-four hours a day. In Israeli media and on social media, the language is shifting; annihilation, starvation, ethnic cleansing, erasure. This is framed as revenge, as punishment of the Gaza Strip following the October 7 massacre, a position that has become increasingly normalised in Israeli public discourse.
Anat Even
