From Ground Zero, the first film ever from Gaza to be elected to the shortlist for the Oscar in the category that honors what used to be known as the Best Foreign Film of the Year, is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen — filmed during a mass slaughter of over 50,000 civilians, the vast majority of them children, women and the elderly. In a brisk and powerful one hour and fifty-two minutes, it weaves together 22 short films made by 22 courageous Palestinian filmmakers living and surviving in Gaza over this past year — all of it told in under 2 hours!

These are stories not being told anywhere. You do not see these stories on the evening news. Military leaders prohibit access so that journalists and filmmakers cannot bring us the truth. Even though you and I pay for this war and we are the providers of all these horrific weapons, we are not allowed to witness what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have declared to be a genocide and an ethnic cleansing — war crimes committed every day in our name. Instead, we are the victims of a powerful propaganda campaign intended to dehumanize the 5 million human beings in all the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are forced to live imprisoned behind walls and barbed wire, forced into starvation, nearly every hospital and school in Gaza bombed to smithereens, half the country’s homes reduced to rubble. Read more from producer Michael Moore.

This excerpt is from the UCCPIN January 2025 E-Newsletter. To view the full newsletter, click here: UCCPIN January 2025 E-Newsletter.