Electrical Gaza

The Gaza Strip just before bombardment of July and August 2014 when more than two thousand Palestinians and seventy-two Israelis were killed. Scenes of quotidian life in refugee camps and in the city of Rafah, site of one of the two remaining gateways out of Gaza, both of which have been closed since.

In Rosalind Nashashibi’s Electrical Gaza (2015), scenes of everyday life in the Gaza strip become mythical encounters with this isolated and besieged fulcrum of the Mediterranean. Filmed on analogue 16mm film, the grain of the surface and interspersed moments of animation create a dreamy atmosphere of respite from the violence typically associated with this enclosed landscape. It was filmed in the months preceding the Israeli ‘Operation Protective Edge’ that bombarded the strip in July and August 2014, this window of time allowed for an image of life in Gaza to be created that counters the mediated images of rubble and destruction with the familiarity of a community operating against all odds. The film is about access and observation of a place that few can get permission to enter or exit, one that became a place of myth after Israel’s military encirclement of the territory in 2007.

Àngels Miranda (Artviewer.org)