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I’m personally honored to inform you that Palestine’s entry to this year’s Academy Awards, the brilliant film FROM GROUND ZERO, has recently been voted by the members of the Motion Picture Academy — one of only 15 films worldwide — for this year’s Oscar shortlist for BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE. I am a proud Executive Producer of this acclaimed movie — AND IT OPENED TODAY in theaters across America.
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.
(For the people under 50 reading this, not a single Palestinian built a single oven or a single gas chamber in the Holocaust that took the lives of the 6 million Jews. Not a single Palestinian stopped boatloads of Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis to dock in New York, Boston, Baltimore or Miami. That, and all the other horrors enacted upon the Jewish people during World War II, were 100% committed by White Christian Europeans and their descendants and cousins who wouldn’t let them into the U.S. to save their lives. By the time American boots hit the beaches of Normandy, 5 million of the 6 million total who died were already slaughtered.
And yet somebody decided it was the… Palestinians who must pay the price???? Somebody is not telling us the truth.)
That this movie even exists is something of a human and cinematic miracle. I so sincerely want you to find a theater showing it this weekend and go see it. By the end of its run next month it will play in over 150 theaters. Listed below, by city, are the ones where it opened today (Jan 3). New ones will be added next week.
My friends, FROM GROUND ZERO mixes dramatic storytelling, documentary, animation — all genres of cinema to make this one of the most compelling films you’ll see this year. Working with whatever tools they were able to pull from the rubble of their homes and their cities, these filmmakers have come together to share these stories with us. And their work is already being honored. Academy voters in this early round of voting have declared this to be an exceptional film. These are filmmakers voting, not politicians and pundits. They recognize this brilliant movie for what it is: A masterwork of great art.
Do not skip this movie because “Oh it’s Gaza” or “I can’t take take this any more” — go see it for the same reason you’ve gone to all the big important movies, from ERIN BROCKOVICH to CHINA SYNDROME to 12 YEARS A SLAVE to OPPENHEIMER. As one of the film’s Executive Producers, I promise you, you will not be disappointed.
Find the nearest theater to you here: https://fromgroundzero.url.film
