As Israel’s deadly military incursions into the Gaza Strip continue unabated, ordinary Gazans seem slowly reduced to a statistic in the international media discourse. But in this insightful and visually striking documentary, Abdulrahman Sabbah manages to put a face to the numbers. And it’s a funny, smiley face that zeroes in on a professional jester’s attempt to keep everyone around him – and himself – happy and healthy in a refugee camp in the southern reaches of the strip. The Clown of Gaza reveals a resilience and joie de vivre that is rarely seen in the Gazans featured in all those bite-sized news bulletins.
Mirroring Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand And Walk, which offers a heartbreaking account of the last days of a young Gazan photojournalist before her death in an Israeli bomb attack early this year, The Clown of Gaza is proof of the incredible talent and hardened spirit of the Gazans who persisted in providing the world with just and empathetic images of the victims of the Israel-Hamas war. It is part of Palestinian filmmaker-producer Rashid Masharawi’s new From Ground Zero+, an ongoing initiative designed to highlight the work of Gazan directors, which premiered at the Amman Film Festival out of competition. Sabbah’s hour-long feature should be of interest to festival programmers or news broadcasters seeking powerfully told and finely filmed personal stories to support Gazans and substantiate coverage of their plight.
“Suffering and pain stay with the living,” notes The Clown of Gaza’s protagonist Alaa Meqdad, as he recalls the death and destruction he has witnessed during his journey from his heavily bombed neighbourhood in Gaza City to the border outpost of Rabah. But we don’t see him shed a single tear. Maybe it’s because he’s glad everyone in his entire family – both parents, four sisters, his wife and their two children – are still alive, but perhaps it’s down to his built-in instincts as a professional clown, trying to tease laughter from people suffering under one of the most deadly and devastating humanitarian disasters in modern history.
When not performing for the children who, like himself, live in the many refugee camps dotted across Rabah, Meqdad visits street stalls set up in front of ruined buildings and attends to the needs of his loved ones in their makeshift home. Veering away from easy sentimentality, Sabbah shows Meqdad’s quotidian life as it is: though short of the comforts of home, Meqdad’s tent isn’t seething with squalor. While he manages to get enough food for his big family, his chats with neighbours and friends reveal the financial abyss staring at them.
The climax of The Clown of Gaza plays out in the last quarter of the film, when Meqdad and his family up stakes and return home. With the help of cinematographers Mouaz Abu Allaban, Ahmad Al Danaf and Mohammad Al Sharif, Sabbah captures the arresting vision of thousands of Gazans marching homeward. In that image alone, individual name and faces come together as a whole, an acknowledgement of the steeled collective will of a people as they try their best to defy the fate imposed on them by deadly aggressors.
Director: Abdulrahman Sabbah
Producers: Laura Nikolov, Rashid Masharawi
Cinematographers: Mouaz Abu Allaban, Ahmad Al Danaf, Mohammad Al Sharif
Editors: Denis Le Paven
Sound designer: Sarah Fasseur-Leroux
Production companies: Coorgines Production, Masharawi Fund Production
Venue: Amman International Film Festival
In Arabic
61 minutes
