4 hours ago
10
By the end of Ahmed Hassouna’s slim, judicious documentary “Citizen Osama,” you might be disoriented by the relative mundaneness of the daily genocidal horror in the stretch of northern Gaza in which it unfolds. After all, media and recent cinema have trained us to need to feel big in all matters Palestine. But in following his friend and fellow war journalist, the titular Osama Al-Ashi, over a single year from the birth of his son in mid-2024 to his first birthday, Hassouna accomplishes something not many filmmakers set out to. Namely, a directness in grasping the everyday instances of living with oppression, which feel as frequently low-key and routine as they do harrowing.
Hassouna’s 69-minute work might at first seem too modest. However, this portrait of a new father, a once-aspiring artist, and one of the few journalists who stayed in northern Gaza even as most of the populace was evacuated to the south, is to be commended precisely because it wears its heart so unassumingly on its sleeve and holds its no-frills camera/boom setup so sturdily in its hands.
In eschewing grand narrative, large vacillation of emotion, and showiness in craft, it achieves a re-sensitization the region perhaps needs as the crisis soon enters its fourth year. Here, too, are denizens who survive by literally holding onto their faith, who want to bury their dead with dignity, who are members of a profession that hustles despite being targeted — who are children who catch snails in the same ocean in which planes drop tons of insufficient life-saving supplies.
They are and should be no one’s enemy, and because this footage of their everyday life exists, they curate themselves into the gallery of this century’s myriad oppressed populations by persisting to record their perspective of their history.
To be clear, the mundaneness, examined piecemeal, is undeniably horrific. In the film’s opening, Osama cradles his newborn son in a shaky hospital setup, instantly making you fear a bombing. Hassouna soon cuts to the aftermath of warning strikes that have destroyed 12 houses near the Shujaiya quarter of Gaza City. Osama, donning his bulletproof blue press jacket and armed with his camera, is accosted by a woman wailing that 200 of her neighbors are gone. People huddle into themselves as they pass each other by, repeating some version of “There is no God but God.” Meanwhile, leaflets ordering evacuations pattern the sky like a damned murmuration, and nighttime artillery fire paints striations like inverted fireworks.
Hassouna and co-editor Denis LePaven pace the chronological patchwork of footage less as a story with a predestined shape, and more as shifting tiles of accumulating losses that the audience can traverse without being too overwhelmed. This is in stark contrast to the heart-rending build in Kaouther Ben Hania’s hybrid reworking of a helpless little girl’s savage murder in “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” or Poh Si Teng embedding articulate talking heads amid her breathless ethnographic approach in “American Doctor.” “Osama,” filmed in utmost secrecy to protect the journalists who stayed behind (about 36 are mentioned in the credits), shows us one year more as dailies, both in the layman and filmmaking senses of the word.
In doing so, the doc unexpectedly disarms the audience, allowing them to imagine, even if the very notion is perverse, that they are closer to the action and to these people. We will remember more readily the names of journalists like Ismail al-Ghoul who became martyrs. We clock Osama’s tears as he helps shoulder his colleagues’ corpses. We hesitate less to laugh along with self-proclaimed bad jokes about why hamburgers run. We, too, register the citizenry’s craving for lemon aubergine. Hassouna’s deceptively straightforward cinematic grammar allows a humanizing parasociality, offering a respite from grappling with the unfathomable proportions and avatars of “genocide.”
The same absence of sensationalism and veneer of reasonableness applies to the world inside Osama’s home. His father begs him to stop work, wondering why filming a story about the closure of bakeries in Jabalia for consumption by outlets like the UK’s Channel 4 is worth risking losing his only son. After accepting that there is no flour, not without worms at least, to bake a cake for her grandson’s birthday, Osama’s mother says matter-of-factly, “We’ll manage without eating. We’ll lie to ourselves.” Hassouna and his DP, Yousef Al Masharawi, frame Osama hunting for Cerelac with the same affect as when he plants a kiss on fast-growing Soheib. Just as after temporary ceasefires, missiles become ordinary, like “a sting in paradise,” our gaze becomes more crystalline, less foreign, as though tears have cleared a stubborn filmic deposit.
Could Hassouna have formed a more incisive portrait of Gaza City’s wartime journalists and their actual output, giving us a sense of the group’s sociology? Could he have presented sharper pictures of particular subjects, like Osama’s wife Reem, who feels sidelined? Could he have sculpted vignettes and been less diary-like?
Yes to all the above, but he might’ve lost a certain directness and moderation that is the film’s stillest strength. Moreover, it’s vitally sufficient we have a documentary with actual footage of the goings-on in Gaza that’s authored by Palestinians on the ground. So few have done that! When they are released in theaters, they can show audiences something closer to the truth, thereby modulating the disinformation wreaked by social media and the imperial slants of TV movies commissioned in the Global North.
An underrated doc that also shows first-hand footage of the devastation in Gaza is Sepideh Farsi’s “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.” The Iranian filmmaker blends in the stunning work of Fatima Hassona, shahid, a talented photojournalist who hailed from the Al-Taffuq quarter of Gaza City, not far from the Al-Ashi family. I can’t help but wonder if Osama and Fatima’s paths crossed when she was alive. The films reveal both subjects to be citizens of a high order: devoted to their form of journalism, to their nation, and to their community. Believers, whom we have direct reason to believe.
Grade: B
“Citizen Osama” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
English (US) ·