Final Rating: 3.5/5
In moments of destruction, there is an urgent necessity to flee. You ought to protect yourself and those around you, especially when death is at the corner. In the 21st century, an age where people speak heavily on the necessity of building peace, cameras and social media spread the imagery of the apocalypse. Genocidal states are destroying houses, murdering children, and women.
Justifying the aftermath of the attack from Hamas, Israel has coordinated an ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians at a haunting velocity. When one of the most potent armies of the world drops tons and tons of missiles on your head, you need to leave everything you built and seek refuge. The veteran director Nicolas Wadimoff documents the wounds of the survivors in Who Is Still Alive (Qui vit encore).
On a black screen, white letters narrate the film’s backstory. A group of refugees fled Palestine and were supposed to reunite in Switzerland, where the film would be shot. Yet, the diplomacy of genocide pressures other countries to deny visas to survivors, and they cannot enter the country.
Therefore they went to South Africa, one of the few countries in the world that welcomes Palestinians without the necessity of a visa, and also, one of the few nations that sued Israel against the genocidal crimes. In a sense, the country recognizes the Apartheid traits in Israel’s ethnic division between Israelis and Palestinians, similar to those practiced for decades in South Africa.
Set in the African continent, a group of Palestinians who fled reunite in a studio. They sit around black cloth and paper. Near them, there are a bunch of white markers. Wadimoff invites them for a creative exercise: draw the towns, camps, and neighborhoods of Gaza. Those nine refugees become cartographers of their pasts, drawing the buildings and stories they left behind.
Inherently, the director asks for an exercise of storytelling, but a therapeutic practice of confronting the pain. By drawing their homes, the director allows them to tell us their stories. Women who left their stores and now live abroad, far from their dreams. It is a fascinating filmic possibility to tell the world of the atrocity of the genocide, which, besides killing, destroys histories and homes. In a sense, by drawing in a black ground for their homes, those refugees provide what Google Maps could never: memories and affection. Now, the outdated satellite images might show their former residences, but they sit together now in rumbles in Gaza.
The director divides the film into two. The first one is the most creative – the drawing of the houses and telling of the stories attached to the physical aspect. They describe the olive trees around their blocks, the neighbors, and every element that constitutes a community. Ironically, despite dropping bombs on them, Israel created a new one, composed of nine refugees, immortalizing their histories in South Africa.
The second part is more direct, with the subjects talking directly to the camera. In this aspect, the proposition of the first half undermines the interest in the second one, not because of the content; those stories are utterly fascinating. However, the format and structure of the first one allow the subjects to provide more affection and details on their previous lives, something that the direct interview fails to achieve. It is protocol and conventional, almost a counterpoint to the first part.
In this sense, Who Is Still Alive functions well due to the fascination of the structure in the first part, which allows the survivors to profoundly open their hearts about what the genocide took from them. Unfortunately, a conventional second part diminishes the impact of a wonderfully crafted concept.
Who Is Still Alive was seen during the 2026 Hot Docs film festival. Thank you to Hot Docs for the screener.
