‘Citizen Osama’ turns life under bombardment into urgent, intimate cinema

At barely 70 minutes, Ahmed Hassouna’s Citizen Osama feels much larger than its running time. Not because it drags, but because of how much life, death and uncertainty it compresses into a short span. Events arrive with the relentlessness of a permanent emergency. Buildings are bombed, people are pulled from rubble, colleagues are killed, food becomes harder to find, and humanitarian aid appears only to prove painfully insufficient. Between these episodes, Osama Al-Ashi goes home to his wife, his young child and his anxious parents. The result is a film in which public catastrophe and private life can no longer be separated. That perspective gives Citizen Osama a striking place beside NAZA , Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary, which has recently drawn significant international attention. Where NAZA examines Israeli military systems through testimony from Israeli personnel, Hassouna remains on the ground with those living beneath their consequences. The films approach the same historical moment from radically different positions. Premiering in Venice Open at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Citizen Osama follows Al-Ashi, once an artistic photographer and now a war documentarian living in northern Gaza. Hassouna shot the film himself; Denis Le Paven edited it, while Rasmus Steen composed its restrained score. The documentary has also been selected as Palestine’s submission for the 2027 Academy Awards. There is little distance here between journalism and filmmaking. Osama’s camera exists first because there is something that urgently needs to be documented. Yet the accumulation of those images, and Hassouna’s shaping of them, gradually transforms reporting into cinema. The distinction becomes almost irrelevant. Recording events is at once a professional duty, a means of producing evidence, an act of memory and, eventually, storytelling. Some of the film’s most difficult passages show people trapped beneath destroyed buildings and the desperate collective effort to reach them. Elsewhere, the deaths of journalists puncture any illusion that the word “PRESS” printed across a protective vest can offer real security. The killing of Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, one of the colleagues mourned in the film, becomes another reminder that Osama can leave home to work and simply not return. Al-Ghoul and cameraman Ramy El Rify were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City in July 2024. But Citizen Osama understands that catastrophe is experienced not only through explosions and death. Sometimes it is measured in flour. Osama searches for basic food for his family and finds flour contaminated with mold and worms: technically available, but barely fit for consumption. Diesel is another constant problem. These details are small compared with the scale of the destruction, and that is precisely why they matter. Hassouna shows what happens when the tasks that ordinarily structure everyday life — buying food, moving around, caring for a child — become precarious logistical operations. A similarly memorable sequence observes humanitarian aid falling from airplanes. Some packages appear to land in the sea, prompting people to enter the water to retrieve them; those that reach land are immediately surrounded by crowds. Hassouna does not need to stop and explain the absurdity of these images. The aid is visible, desperately needed, and, at the same time, clearly inadequate to the need around it. The film’s tight editing is crucial. Citizen Osama could easily have become a succession of horrors, each image attempting to overwhelm the previous one. Instead, Le Paven repeatedly returns the film to Osama’s family and colleagues. His parents worry about both Gaza’s future and the immediate possibility that their son might not come home. His wife and child embody another responsibility, one that exists uneasily beside his determination to continue working. And then, remarkably, people still laugh. In one deceptively minor scene, Osama and other journalists trade terrible jokes. They are not especially funny, which is part of what makes the moment so affecting. Humor becomes less an escape from reality than another way of continuing to exist inside it. Citizen Osama repeatedly notices these fragments of ordinary behavior without sentimentalizing them. “Resilience” is a word so often applied to Palestinians that it risks becoming an abstraction. Hassouna makes it physical. It means digging through ruins to help another person. It means finding something to eat. It means going back to work. It can also mean telling a bad joke when almost nothing around you provides a reason to laugh. This creates the film’s central tension: between agency and inevitability. Osama is constantly acting — filming, moving, providing, helping, protecting — within circumstances over which he possesses almost no control. Hope therefore does not emerge from any suggestion that conditions are about to improve. Citizen Osama offers little basis for that kind of optimism. What survives instead is the refusal to surrender every remaining form of agency. Hassouna largely avoids turning the documentary into an exercise in political exposition. There are no lengthy explanatory passages instructing viewers how to process what they are seeing. The images and Osama’s circumstances carry the argument. Its graphic moments can be extremely difficult to watch, but sanitizing them would produce a different and considerably less truthful film. The spare use of music works for the same reason: the film rarely needs to tell us when an image is devastating. In the film’s press notes, Hassouna describes Osama as more than an individual protagonist, someone through whom he could express something of his own experience and that of others who have lived through the war. He calls the film an attempt to preserve what they have lived through and to safeguard their humanity. In the same notes, he describes Venice as an opportunity to tell their story in their “own voice and through our own images.” That phrase may provide the clearest key to Citizen Osama . The camera cannot stop the destruction surrounding Osama. It cannot guarantee his safety, find food for his family, or bring his colleagues back. What it can do is preserve evidence that these lives existed in all their fear, exhaustion, affection, absurdity, and stubborn humanity. That is also why the comparison with NAZA matters. One film interrogates military systems from within Israeli society; the other records what life looks like underneath their consequences. Citizen Osama may not yet have received comparable attention, but it belongs fully to the same cinematic reckoning — not as an accompanying document, but as a work in its own right. For its rather brief duration, it turns the act of looking into an act of survival.