Director: Nicolas Wadimoff (Qatar, Switzerland, Israel). Year of Release: 2010
A haunted house which is, you must admit, a bit sub-standard. It presumably has seen better days before it was demolished. We’re at an amusement park in Gaza, and most of the original exhibits have been bombed out of existence. We will later take a similar visit to the zoo. The young zookeeper regrets that not many people visit his increasingly few exhibits, but “most people are too scared to leave their houses anyway”.
Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza) is a series of vignettes, watching citizens of Gaza as they do their best to get along with an everyday life. This was filmed in 2019, just after the 2018 Israeli bombing raids, so people watching in 2024 are confronted with an extra irony (if that is an appropriate word). Most of the ruins which we watch in the film no longer exist in any way, shape or form. What was started in 2018 (and before) has reached new heights – better said, depths.
We see a group of Palestinian men drinking coffee with each other. One asks whether he has added the expected 7 spoonfuls of sugar. They have received an automated phone call asking them to release Gilad Shalit. For those who don’t remember, Shalit was an Israeli soldier who was kidnapped, and Palestinians were subjected to collective punishment until he was released. We can argue about whether combatants are innocent, but Palestinian civilians were made to suffer.
One of the most emotional scenes for me was the clowns, who visit schools in Gaza and try to offer some sense to the traumatised kids. People dressed in bright wigs try to tell the local kids that everything is ok, that life can go on as normal. Occasionally they sit on one of the balloons strapped to their backside and make fun of the loud bangs which are a common feature of life in Gaza. If kids are able to laugh at the terror, maybe this can help them cope with the trauma.
One scene is set in a school. Suddenly a bomb goes off and the teachers have to find a way of calming the kids down. I am reminded of when I visited the family of a friend from West Belfast in the 1990s. We were chatting in the living room and all of a sudden we heard a loud noise in the background. My friend’s father said “Oh, that’s just a bomb!” This is not something which should be normalised. Kids should not be allowed to grow up with something like this as everyday life.
Later we see a UN food queue near the Rafah border. Because of the lack of available flour, Palestinians end up fighting against each other. Women scream that they have been at the border waiting for aid for months but they have family commitments. If they miss one day, they may lose out on any of the available food. The UN people look on exasperated, saying “this is all we are able to offer”. Since then, things have got worse. Israeli soldiers shoot people in these queues dead.
Another part of the film interviews a group of kids about their ambitions. They explain that if life were different, they would become doctors, people who save people. But as Gaza is how it is, they will probably just become martyrs. They say this matter of factly – not as something they want to do, but as an inevitable result of the balance of power in the region. You wonder if any, or many, of the kids interviewed, took part in the attacks on 7th October.
Some of the things said might need a little context added. One kid explains how nothing will be solved “until we get rid of the Jews”. A Western European, and particularly a German, who has been brought up with a certain discourse, will see this as proof of “Arab antisemitism” – a phrase which Is now used to remove any guilt from Germany for its current support for genocide. If the Arabs all hate Jews irrationally, then maybe they deserve to be bombed.
But let us look more closely at the kid’s relationship with Jewish people. His only permanent contact comes from the permanent bombing raids on his home, which are performed by the air force of the “Jewish State”. While he has misspoken, he has every reason to do so. This is not the European antisemitic argument that the Jews are the root of all evil, but a personal experience that the people who are destroying his country say they are doing this in the name of Judaism.
Aisheen takes an interesting turn when it follows the rap group the DARG Team to a local radio station. Before an interview, the people working for the radio publish listeners’ responses. They are almost entirely negative. The callers say that rap is a Western art form, and that while it may work in other cultures, any attempt to rap in Arabic is a concession to imperialism. The DARG members – essentially a teenage gang – look bemused, but just say, this is what they do.
I think they missed a trick here. Sure, rap is “Western”, in the same way that the political interventions of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were a response to discussions which were happening in the USA. The big divisions in society are not a result of nation but of class, and a reaction to racism and imperialism. The DARG Team is absolutely right to take up a cultural art form used by Black people in US-American ghettoes to oppose US domination.
The film takes its name from the new album by the DAWG Team. Aisheen is Arabic for “still alive”. Particularly for a 2024 audience, which has watched the slow destruction of Gaza, Aisheen shows a resilience which we have no right to expect. In the film, parents teach their kids that we must resist, we must survive. If people in Gaza are not prepared to sink into helplessness, the least that you can do is to continue to show your solidarity.
I saw the film this evening in a special showing by the Berlin POC Art Collective and the theleftberlin website. After the film was showed, we collected €550 for Mutual Aid & Resilient Livelihoods in Gaza. Please add your donations to this cause.
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