Life Support (15)
Directed by Daniele Rugo
⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑

“WE are the vessel of their stories. We act as people who tell them every day that we’ve not forgotten.”

With forensic precision, this excruciating documentary lays bear the sheer scale of the Western-backed genocide in Gaza. To watch is to bear witness, and to share the film’s existence is a tiny act of resistance against the collective media shrug at the ongoing torture, ethnic cleansing and terror being unleashed on Palestine by our regime’s close friends and allies, the state of Israel.

Life Support pieces together video diaries, on-the-ground footage, and after-the-event testimony from Western medics who have worked in Gaza, on and off, and at the whims of Israeli security forces, since October 2023. Plastic surgeons, paediatric intensive care doctors, gastrointestinal surgeons: all speak with steady, calm rage about the horrors witnessed and the lack of consequences for the Western governments and media outlets who have been aiding, abetting and covering up for this orgy of cruelty and violence every step of the way.

These are people who see death as a regular part of their professions, but nothing like this. The eloquence, though, is staggering. Effusive in their praise for their Palestinian comrades, working under impossible conditions, and with clear survivors’ guilt for their ability to return to their comfortable lives back in the West. And yet, as one Canadian doctor puts it: “Thank god I’m not a passive observer of genocide.”

Torture. The deliberate targeting of civilians. The destruction of hospitals. The deliberate withdrawal of food, electricity and water. Bored Israeli soldiers choosing to shoot teenagers in the testicles one day, or in the throat the next. Cancer patients with nowhere to go, and seven-month old children as small as a new-born baby, so complete is this most cynical and man-made of ongoing famines.

Heartbreaking, too, are the snapshots, filmed by locals, of Gaza before the war. Markets, farmers, fishermen. Kids laughing and zipping around on rollerblades or playing on the beach. Fast forward a few years, and all that remains is rubble and ongoing humiliation.

As British gastrointestinal surgeon Nick Maynard puts it, this has been “the most live-streamed genocide in history… met with silence.” No-one can claim that they did not know what was happening. But with powerful works like this, we can, perhaps, push the scales towards the justice Palestinians so desperately deserve.

In cinemas July 10.