DIFF26 | Who Is Still Alive (2025) | Nicolas Wadimoff | 1h 53m
SC5 | Wed 29 July | 5pm & SC7 | Sun 2nd Aug | 5pm
There are no statistics here. There are no images of bombed-out buildings. No before-and-after satellite images of devastation. No discussions of political actors. These are nine people in a blacked-out studio talking of their love for Gaza, the land, the music, the people. Wadimoff resists the familiar grammar, and while the film sometimes grapples for imagery, the cumulative effect is human.
Here are some people, who loved a place, wish to return to that place, and mourn the loss of what that place was, while that place still is.
They recount details. They describe. There was the sea, there was this music school I used to go to, I built these shelves, my grandfather built this house stone by stone. The rockets hit my neighbour's house. We carried her out, she was full of shrapnel. I got lost because I could no longer tell the streets apart. I left people behind. I don't know how to go back.
Nine residents of Gaza, who now live in Egypt, who do not have the right to return, the right to work — they live a strange half-life of memory, regret and impotence. In the face of this moment they recount their humanness, their memories, the moments that got them to this place. This is all that this film is.
They gather themselves. They are people.
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