Samouni Road

The Samouni family, farmers on the rural edge of Gaza, are preparing for a wedding; it is their first celebration since the war. In January 2009, during the Israeli army’s operation in Gaza, twenty nine members of the family were killed and their houses and olive groves destroyed. The film moves through what the survivors say; what the children remember is given in scratchboard animation, and those passages rest entirely on their testimony. As the family replant the trees and plough the fields, they are also trying to piece their own memory together. Stefano Savona’s hundred and twenty nine minute Italian production took the prize for best documentary at Cannes in 2018.