2026 - 1h 17m Language: Arabic
Country: Palestine
World Premiere at TIFF-Toronto International Film Festival
*NETPAC AWARD WINNER 2026
Director
Hosam Abu Dan
Writer
Khalil al Mozian
Stars
Nawaf Abu Amra
Feras Al Masri
Ghassan Salem
This is Palestinian director Hosam Abu Dan’s first feature film, shot entirely inside the Gaza Strip with a fully Palestinian crew. And honestly, it couldn’t have been made anywhere else. The landscape itself becomes a character—its danger, its exhaustion, its quiet desperation woven into every frame. Filming it elsewhere would have stripped the story of its truth.
The film follows Raghad (Mary Ziyara), a 13‑year‑old girl who has lost her home and most of her family after an airstrike during the Gaza war. She and her father (Feras Al Masri) are forced into a displacement camp, where life becomes a daily negotiation of survival. For a teenage girl, this new reality is a nightmare: sharing a tent with her father, learning to bake bread over open flames, hauling water, and navigating puberty without a mother to guide her.
Her father, gentle and devoted, tries desperately to protect her and preserve some sense of normalcy. But desperation pushes people toward impossible choices. He takes on a dangerous opportunity he believes will help his daughter—only for it to unravel with devastating consequences.
Dialogue is sparse, but the film speaks volumes through Raghad’s eyes and her father’s weary silence. Their performances are subtle, expressive, and heartbreakingly real. Abu Dan’s choice to film inside actual encampments lays bare the collateral damage of war—what greed, politics, and power do to ordinary people who never asked to be part of any conflict.
If this isn’t a film that shows why wars must end, I don’t know what is. The ones who pay the highest price are always the young, the elderly, the vulnerable, and the poor—while those who profit from conflict remain untouched, growing richer off the suffering of others.
This film is a quiet, devastating reminder of who war really destroys.
