THE “WORLD” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Filmed in 2018, Excursion to Gazaby the Franco-Italian Piero Usberti, is seen as the memory of a city and an urban fabric that no longer exists. Everything the director filmed six years ago, the restaurants, the apartments where the young people he met lived, were destroyed by Israeli bombardment in response to the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Needless to say, every shot in this film that strives to capture beauty (a strawberry field in Beit Lahya, the Al Baqa cafe by the sea, etc.) conveys a heavy dose of melancholy. Free and poetic, this documentary, whose post-production was completed at the end of September 2023, is already a piece of history in itself. Produced by Arnaud Dommerc (Andolfi), it was unveiled at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris.
Born in 1992, a philosopher by training, Piero Usberti was 25 years old when he went to Gaza in March 2018 – he stayed there for three months in two consecutive stays. Ever since he was a teenager, he had images of this land stuck between Egypt and Israel (under blockade since 2007), while his father, an academic, organized exchanges with Palestine. On the spot, the director was met by the Italian Meri Calvelli, the founder of the Italian Center for Cultural Exchange in Gaza, which has been working with international cooperation for thirty-two years.
An engaged point of view
Fluid editing, director’s voiceover punctuated by percussion: the film opens in the middle of a funeral Palestinian photojournalist Yasser Mourtaja, killed on April 6, 2018. The Israeli army shot him in the abdomen while he was wearing the badge “press” and covered the “return march” – a commemorative demonstration Nakbathe exodus of Palestinians at the time of the creation of the Jewish state in 1948.
“My voiceover is not meant to give a history lesson, but I am pointing out facts: Israel carried out a project of occupation and then expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.explain World Piero Usberti. There’s nothing wrong with saying that. I am not against the idea of a secular state, where Jews and Palestinians would coexist with equal rights. At the beginning of the 20th yeare century, Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in Palestine »he recalls.
It’s an engaged point of view that the filmmaker offers (not pictured) as he scouts the sites with the bright, then 25-year-old Sara – she was working at a women’s mutual aid center at the time. . “I live in Gaza City”she said, while explaining geographically the locking of the “strip”: to the south, the Rafah gate on the border with Egypt, to the north, Erez on the border with Israel.
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