Samouni Road

In the rural outskirts of Gaza City, the Samouni extended family is about to celebrate a wedding. It’s going to be the first celebration since Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s massive 22-day assault on the besieged Gaza Strip when 29 members of the family were killed. The neighborhood where they live is being rebuilt. As they replant trees and plow fields, they face their most difficult task: piecing together their own memory. Through these young survivors’ recollections, Samouni Road conveys a deep, multifaceted portrait of a family before, during, and after the catastrophic trauma that changed their lives forever.

Italian filmmaker Stefano Savona spent nine years trying to reconstruct what happened to make Samouni Road. The film combines vérité video with striking black-and-white animation and simulated drone footage to dramatize the catastrophe, underlining the continuing strain the conflict places on Palestinian citizens—and highlighting the surprising resilience of the human spirit.

“The clear intent here is to go beyond the emergency view of the Arab-Israeli conflict that we absorb through our TV news screens and social media feeds, in order simply to spend time with an ordinary Palestinian family attempting to piece together its life after a terrible trauma.” – Lee Marshall, Screen Daily

Winner of the Golden Eye for Best Documentary, Cannes Film Festival 2018, Best Documentary, Bari International Film Festival, 2019