'SAQFA (Hopeless Clap)' by Omar Saleh is a bleak and profoundly touching short experimental movie that deprives war of abstraction and gives it back to the flesh, the breath, and the connection between two sisters who are desperate to stay intact in a world that is disintegrating. The action of the film takes place in northern Gaza at the beginning of 2024 and refuses to indulge in spectacle and rhetoric and instead remains in the precarious realm where survival itself is an act of rebellion.
The story is misleadingly intricate. With the capture of their father in the ground invasion, Raneem is pushed into an early adulthood, leading her blind younger sister, Aseel, through the dangers of the Salah al-Din Road and Netzarim axis of the Salihi area. They are not configured as strategic sites or geopolitical points, but as residential areas of terror and uncertainty, where each moment of movement is a bargaining moment with fear and each moment of standing is potentially a moment of death. The camera of Saleh does not treat these roads as a setting to the extent that responsibility and love can exert the strongest pressure there.
The unique feature of SAQFA is its experimental nature that reflects the reality it describes, which is fractured. The movie tends to be ambiguous in nature, preferring to use disjointed images, distorting noises, and almost entirely silence. This aesthetic decision puts the audience in the situation of the sisters, especially the sense world of Aseel, where sight is substituted with greater vulnerability and trust. It is not heroic in any traditional sense of the word; it is uncertain, nervous, and extremely human.
Sisterhood is the key element of the film. The way Raneem directs Aseel is more a practical approach than an emotional one, a fragile lifeline made of love instead of certainty. This becomes their muted defiance against erasure, in which they insist on the continuation of care despite the failure of systems around them. It is in such situations that SAQFA resonates the most: survival is not only about reaching safety, but also about not letting fear destroy the ties that hold us together as one.
Most importantly, Saleh does not involve polemics. SAQFA is not posing a political stand, nor is it prescribing moral identities based on ideological lines. Rather, it dwells on the human condition of apprehension, defeat, and optimism in a war zone. By basing the film on the most personal gestures and mutual vulnerability, Saleh makes us remember that the real toll of war is not taken in conquered lands, but in broken families and disrupted childhoods.
The film finishes its last movements without giving the viewer a resolution, but rather leaves a feeling of witnessing behind. It is a movie that encourages us to avoid judgment and to experience, to see beyond the headlines and the statistics the precarious endurance of life. By doing so, Omar Saleh creates a chilling meditation on survival which resonates even after the screen goes dark.
Written by Vlad A.G