International Feature Film Competition
Gaza, 2007. A young student finds work and unlikely kinship with a warm-hearted restaurateur whose side hustle funds survival. Delivery runs become drug drops, and a swaggering policeman with a taste for petty power closes in. Between camaraderie and coercion, the city’s rhythms blur thriller, buddy story and deadpan comedy. Life and spectacle collide, exposing how images can wound or protect and how ordinary men keep going when choices shrink to whatever keeps them alive.
Gaza, 2007. A young student finds work and unlikely kinship with a warm-hearted restaurateur whose side hustle funds survival. Delivery runs become drug drops, and a swaggering policeman with a taste for petty power closes in. Between camaraderie and coercion, the city’s rhythms blur thriller, buddy story and deadpan comedy. Life and spectacle collide, exposing how images can wound or protect and how ordinary men keep going when choices shrink to whatever keeps them alive.
Set in Gaza in 2007, the story follows a student whose hunger for work, recognition, and warmth leads him to a charismatic restaurateur. Delivery runs double as drug drops; favours are traded; horizons narrow. Into this fragile equilibrium strides a corrupt policeman whose uniform inflates a small man into a threat. Their cat-and-mouse is tense yet laced with rueful humour, folding buddy movie beats and thriller undercurrents into an everyday portrait of a place too often reduced to headlines. By lingering on pauses and small negotiations, the narrative reframes heroism as endurance: the quiet labour of staying, adapting and carrying on under a blockade that makes every choice contingent.
The filmmaking tilts toward a ‘reverse shot’: not a statement about politics so much as attention to life, work, and the insistence on normality despite siege and sudden violence. Reality and fiction scrape against each other. The result is neither victimhood nor bravado, but a humane ledger of choices made under pressure. Men posture, joke and scheme, yet what lingers is tenderness withheld, the absence of women as an intentional void, and the sense that images themselves are weapons, sometimes shield, sometimes spectacle. Patience, endurance, and the stubborn right to be seen become their quiet acts of resistance, even as the scene threatens to close.
The filmmaking tilts toward a ‘reverse shot’: not a statement about politics so much as attention to life, work, and the insistence on normality despite siege and sudden violence. Reality and fiction scrape against each other. The result is neither victimhood nor bravado, but a humane ledger of choices made under pressure. Men posture, joke and scheme, yet what lingers is tenderness withheld, the absence of women as an intentional void, and the sense that images themselves are weapons, sometimes shield, sometimes spectacle. Patience, endurance, and the stubborn right to be seen become their quiet acts of resistance, even as the scene threatens to close.
