The Exception

The medium of film is capable of bringing nuances of power to audiences, even when the story-world is steeped in autocracy and totalitarianism. The Exception (2016) is such a film, for in terms of power the film shows the relationship between the Nazi government of Germany and (retired) Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Netherlands, which has just been occupied by Germany. The Nazi officials represent the state, whereas Wilhelm’s “soft” power stems from royalty. As Wilhelm’s attendant, Col. Sigurd von Ilsemann, observes, no one is safe from Nazi reprisals, not even Wilhelm and his high-brow wife. So he is not the exception alluded to in the title in the sense of being exempt from raw Nazi power; the night of the long knives demonstrated that no one is safe, even though the former king still means a lot to the German people. The exception refers instead to Capt. Stefan Brandt, and in particular to his moral scruples concerning the Nazi mass murders in eastern Europe. As the story unfolds with a visit by Himmler, Wilhelm becomes an exception in this sense too. Even in a totalitarian autocracy, a surprising amount of soft power can exist in opposition. Taking a moral stand can manifest "soft" power even though an ethic is semi-permeable by power-aggrandizement.

The captain has been sent by General Falkenberg to Wilhelm’s country house in Holland to guard the former Kaiser. Stefan and Mieke, a Dutch Jew who is a maid in the house and is secretly funneling intel to the British via a clergyman in town, fall in love. Mieke discovers that Stefan too has reservations about the Nazis’ brutality, and he goes so far as to keep her outlawed ethnicity a secret and then to help her escape. Even Wilhelm helps her by feigning a heart attack and thus a rationale to be driven seemingly to a hospital. As the story unfolds, Stefan and Wilhelm both turn vehemently though of course secretly against the Nazis, having learned of their utter moral depravity by listening to Himmler at a dinner for him at the house.

That visit highlights the real power dynamics between the Nazi state and the former king. Wilhelm and his wife appease Himmler outwardly because the Nazis have all of the official power; they give the household a financial allowance and allow the former king and his wife to continue living. In exchange, the couple put up a public display of loyalty to the state. Yet even in this regard, the pedigree “soft” power of being royalty allows the couple to refuse to say, “Heil Hitler” back to Himmler in his arrival. Even though Himmler could order the couple to be shot, he does not use his power to force the royals to speak the two words. The film thus illustrates that oppositional “soft” power can exist even in a totalitarian dictatorship; power dynamics are complex rather than linear.

Before sitting down to the dinner, Himmler holds what he calls “a private audience” with Wilhelm to offer the former king the choice of whether to return to Berlin to once again wear his ceremonial crown. Of course Hitler would never tolerate even a ceremonially-based potential rival or threat to his authority as the Leader (Fuhrer), and Himmler reveals to Stefen and Dietrich that the offer is really a ploy to uncover pro-monarchists in order to have them killed. Even though Stefen uses his soft power to inform Col. Ilsemann of the trick, Wilhelm choses not to return to Berlin to take up his crown again before being informed that the offer is a plot. Instead, Wilhelm acts on moral principle to use the soft power in Himmler having given Wilhelm the choice. Taking advantage of being given a choice is another example of soft power even in the context of a totalitarian regime.

Wilhelm makes his decision based on what he learns about Himmler and the Nazis from Himmler himself at the dinner table. To be sure, both men are in perfect agreement on the dangers posed by international Jewry. In 2026, after years of the Israeli holocaustic genocide in Gaza and Israeli blatant theft and outright, unprovoked violence in the West Bank against lawful Palestinian homeowners, someone in the U.S. casually informed me, “more people are going back to Hitler’s writings.” This information at first shocked me, as I would never have believed such a statement in the twentieth century, but then I understood why people—especially young people—would do so. In the film, that Himmer and Wilhelm, a Christian who would exercise restraint on the Nazi state were he to re-assume his crown in Berlin, agree on the dangers poised in terms of power (and money, as, for example, AIPAC represents in the U.S.) lends credibility to the stand. Himmler’s observation that the danger posed only became widely known in the 1920s harkens back to the refusal of rich German Jews to extend their charity to other Germans (as if they constituted another people) during the years when Germany had to pay harsh post-World War I war reparations. 

The two men deviate, however, when Himmler pivots to discuss the need to remove people in eastern Europe to make room for Germans—“other means” would be needed if removal is not sufficient—and to kill retarded and crippled children on a scale beyond the capabilities of injecting poison into the heart because not enough of them would be killed fast enough that way. If allowed to reach adulthood, those people would only continue to be a drain on the resources of state. The revelation of Himmler’s thinking and values leaves Wilhelm and his wife, as well as Capt. Stefan and Col. Ilsemann speechless in dombfoundness; none of them had keine Anung of just how sordid the Nazis are. Mieke too, being Jewish, looks on in a harsh facial demeanor; she knew, for her parents were killed by Himmler’s SS. At the end of the dinner, as Stefan walks past her, she sternly tells him, “They are the rule; you are the exception.” She knows of what his reaction to Himmler’s statements must have been. She would hardly have fallen in love with him had he been “the rule,” though it is admittedly possible to fall in love with someone with dreadful, mendacious values.

Even when Wilhelm and Stefan know that Mieke is an enemy agent, the two men help her to escape. The willingness of both men to help can be interpreted not only as indicative of their admiration for her, but also of their utter rejection of the Nazi party and its horrendous tactics. At the University of Wisconsin in the 2000s, I sat in on a course on Nazi Cinema (in contrast to Stalin’s blatantly patriotic Soviet cinema). The eighty-year-old German professor, who flew to Wisconsin every autumn to teach, had been forced to go to a Hitler youth camp, and he had seen Hitler in person. Even though the professor told me that Hitler was not behaving like the angry, sullen man typically pictured in the footage selected by the Allies to air over decades, that the Nazis murdered 19 million Slavs in eastern Europe—in a myriad of non-combative villages and towns rather than in battle—is a relatively unknown fact that best attests to the Nazi mentality.

In the film, Wilhelm leaves the dinner is silence to chop wood so he can reconsider whether to accept Hitler’s “offer” of resumed kingship, now that Wilhelm knows how horrendously different the Nazis are. Even though Stefan has informed Col. Ilsemann that the offer is a ploy—a “deception” in Himmler’s own words—word has not yet reached Wilhelm by the time he decides to stay at his country house with his wife for the rest of his life rather than be in any way associated with the government. Because Wilhelm wants nothing more than to resume his kingship, his decision illustrates just how much sway ethical principles can have against other motives. To be sure, such principles are semi-permeable, in that they can be broken through in the quest for power or money, for instance, but that they have this quality renders Wilhelm’s stance all the more worthy of human nature. Just as power-aggrandizing and economizing (e.g., greed) can break through ecologizing (semi-permeable) constraints (e.g. the equilibrium state of an ecosystem in nature), so too power-seeking and greed can act as rockets shooting through the higher net of ethical values.

As Al Pacino says at the Devil in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), “Free-will, it’s a bitch!” In The Exception, Stefan uses his free-will to risk asking Col. Ilsemann whether a solder can have a loyalty higher than to one’s country; Ilsemann points out that Germany may not be their country any longer, as it belongs to the Nazis with whom both men reject, albeit in the silence of their own hearts. Wilhelm is able to use the “soft” power of royalty to reject Himmler’s offer, as Wilhelm is given a choice, even though Himmler then having Wilhelm killed is easily imaginable.

Finally, Mieke uses her free-will to marry Stefan, if he survives the war; she is, after all, pregnant with his child. She has been willing to open herself up to his seed in part because he is the exception rather than the rule in Nazi Germany. Being the exception is all about values and free-will. To be willing to fully open up to, and take hold of romantic love without too much emotional harm, a person must sense congruent values and therefore trust in another’s free-will so as not to be constantly looking over one’s shoulder for the roof to suddenly fall in from a searing, heedless, and utterly selfish betrayal. It comes as no surprise in the film to see Himmler in a bedroom in the country house with a half-naked woman, who, as Wilhelm’s wife coyly observes in greeting Himmler when he arrives, is not Himmler’s wife; Himmler just looks on, wholly unperturbed in his visage, and then says he is tired from the journey and wants to go to the bedroom that has been prepared for him. The ecologizing, semi-permeable quality of ethical stances—whether the ethical is to be valued or not—is  a matter of character mixed with free-will. It is a fool’s errand in college (e.g., in vocational business schools) to suppose that ethical conduct can be imposed through teaching.

Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

Ironically, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage, two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord is that?  

Eichmann was evidently an atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian, the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home. Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.

In fact, the narrative’s pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite. In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India, Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting evil.

Although Eichmann strangely volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially, anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted, high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over 70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place! Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair, knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.

The film ends with Avner Less mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg trial.

In the film, and perhaps in the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.  Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but, strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”

In The Reader, released in 2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape. This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.

Nuremberg

It is said that history is written by the victors. The film, Nuremberg (2025), bears that out. Even though Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trial, compromises its integrity and thus breaches due process by pressuring Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist assigned to the Nazi prisoners (most notably Goring), to obtain and pass on the defense’s strategy to Jackson, which Kelley does, the trial is presented nonetheless as legitimate and the Nazi prisoners as even deserving an unfair trial. Nevertheless, nations governed by the rule of law are never justified in putting on corrupt trials, or skewing them to push a particular ideology. The film itself is skewed to highlight the Nazi crimes against the Jews at the expense of delving more into the distinctly war crimes even though those crimes were just as important in the charges in the actual trial.

Jackson’s questioning of Goring on whether the Treaty of Versailles justified Germany to take over Austria and the Sudetenland was brief, and the invasion of other occupied territories, such as France, was entirely omitted in the film. Instead, Jackson pushed Goring on what he knew about the concentration camps. Jackson’s reason, which he states in the film, is that what the Nazi SS did in those camps separates the Germans from the Americans. In other words, the holocaust singles out the Nazis in world history. But as of 2025, that statement could not stand, for the holocaustic genocide of the Palestinian “race” in Gaza meant that the Nazis’ crimes against humanity were no longer unique. If, as the psychiatrist says in the film, the Nazi holocaust is “the definition of evil,” then that definition could be extended beyond the scope of the Nazis in the twenty-first century to include, ironically, Israel.

What gave rise to World War II was not the concentration camps. Rather, Germany’s invasions of other sovereign countries in Europe, especially Poland, was the cause. Hitler’s militarism in taking over Europe should thus have received most of the screen-time of the film. If as Jackson argues, Germany could not blame the treaty that ended World War I as justifying occupying Austria, what of other countries, such as France, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which were not Germanic culturally? In short, the filmmakers could have drawn on more material on the war crimes to balance out the film. That would be consistent with the fact that the Jewish matter was only the third priority of the Nazis. The first priority—and why Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor—was to get rid of the Communist Party. The second priority was to create living space in Europe beyond Germany for the German people.

Also receiving too little attention in the film was Jackson’s questioning of Goring on why the Nazis got rid of political opposition, and thus democracy. Goring’s answer that democracy had produced weak leaders could have been explored, especially as the Nazis came into power in 1933 by democratic means. The party held enough of the Bundestag for Hitler to have a legitimate democratic claim as a possible chancellor. Such inconvenient facts are arguably more interesting than simply reminding the viewers of the holocaust. The irony is that emphasizing it so much in the film, viewers in 2025 could have thought of Netanyahu and his crime against humanity in Gaza. Using a film to push an ideological agenda can come back to bite filmmakers.

Furthermore, given the militaristic forays of Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, and America’s Trump in the mid 2020’s, more screentime devoted to why the democracy fell to the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, what was behind Hitler’s invasions of other countries, and why no other country’s government stopped the aggression in time to avert a global war could have addressed contemporary events facing the world as international law was no longer a viable means of restraint, internationally. The film could have had Goring explain Hitler’s rationale more for having instituted a dictatorship, and for why Hitler played other governments so his invasions could continue unabated. The susceptibility of democracy to slip into a dictatorship was a salient worry in the U.S. in the early and mid-2020s due to fears that President Trump was or would shirk democracy. Governments doing nothing to stop Hitler’s incremental advancements militarily could be compared with governments doing nothing to stop Israel’s genocide of the race in Gaza, and too little to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The film being used primarily to remind viewers of how the Nazis viewed and treated Jews is both redundant (e.g., Schindler’s List) and has a rather large opportunity cost in terms of what the film could have covered more adequately but did not due to the screentime devoted to the Jewish theme. To be sure, Goring admitting in court that he would have followed Hitler even knowing about the holocaust only from the trial (which is a lie) is a poignant moment in the film. Crimes against humanity, whether in Gaza or Germany, are indeed horrific, but it is a mistake to minimize distinctively war crimes just because they are more ordinary.

Dying

As a Jewish kid in Nazi Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale (I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer had left), had to lie in order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay, he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before they’re not.

In the film, Sally, who is dying, says that everyone dies, so “I have no fear of death.” Harriet, Bill’s wife, is relieved when her husband’s cancer recommences out of remission. “The longer this gets dragged out,” she complains to his doctor. Stunningly, she says, “I prayed that the chemotherapy wouldn’t work.” The physician reminds her that Bill’s feelings should be taken into account. “He has the basic right to make some of these decisions.” After the film, Roemer informed the audience at Yale that Bill’s wife had been abandoned by her mother. After Bill’s death, she married a man who had left his wife and had five kids. Harriet had had a bad life. Her attitude toward Bill’s prospect of dying was indeed very real—human, one might way, all too human. The question is perhaps whether she is culpable in the film for wishing that her husband would finish the job and just die. I contend that she is, regardless of her past, for as depicted in the film, she is his wife and so she should be supporting him as he faces the ultimate demise. There is a revealing scene in which the two of them are sitting together in silence. Is she waiting for him to die?

Also documented in the film is Rev. Byrant, an old Black man who is dying of cancer. “The only thing I can do is put my trust in God, and try to live as long as possible,” he says. In preaching a sermon at his church, he says, “Jesus tells the man, your daughter is sleeping.” She is dead. Later, he remarks, “Jesus died for me on the Cross; he will take me.” Such faith is laudable. With people like Harriet in the world, the Rev. Byrant can hardly be blamed for having such an other-worldly faith.

Whether in the midst of a troubled marriage or in hopes of being taken by Jesus, these stories in Michael Roemer’s documentary attest to people being honest regarding how they are approaching the prospect of death, whether that of a close relation or oneself. The medium of film has been said to ultimately be on the human condition. Even science fiction has something to say about us as we really are. For the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and the residents of Gaza during the Israeli genocide, the essentials of life were undoubtedly felt as very real. Living itself was doubtlessly made transparent in itself. Film can do this too. Even in portraying the brutal honesty of the Nazis and Israelis with regard to people they deemed as sub-human, the medium of film can help the rest of us to be more aware of the fullness of human nature, beyond our knowledge of ourselves and our immediate context.

From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza

Twenty-two real-life stories fraught with suffering and a pervading sense of utter hopelessness: The film, From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza (2024), is a documentary in want of a solution that did not come not only in 2024, but also in 2025. That Rashid Masharawi, the film’s director, survived even the release of the film is remarkable. Israel clearly did not want true stories from Gaza reaching the rest of the world even though it was not as if the rest of us could miss the photos of the mass devastation throughout Gaza and the resulting tent camps in 2025. It precisely because societal-level figures, such as 65,000 or 75,000 civilians murdered and over a million left starving and homeless, can be easily separated from the plights of individuals and families on the ground that Masharawi’s film is so valuable. Juxtaposed with the Gaza-wide statistics befitting the genocide and perhaps holocaust, the 22 stories in the film give the world a sense of what experiencing a holocaustic genocide is really like.

In the first story alone, a woman has a sense that her life is already over. With her father having been killed by the Israelis in 2014 and news that her sister’s house has just been bombed, the refugee mourns the loss of her sister’s entire family (including her sister). Meanwhile, a million residents of Gaza are at the border with Egypt and diseases are spreading. The second story is more graphic, as it includes digging people out of a bombed building. In the third story, Istrubi, a film maker whose film has won an award at a film festival abroad, cannot leave Gaza. “Time has become my enemy,” he says. Without any humanitarian aid and the loss of his brother in a random bombing, Istrubi faces utter hopelessness.

In the fourth story, a young woman in Gaza keeps a bag packed in case she has to leave her house quickly, for any house could be bombed at any time. Referring to the constancy of Israeli drones in the air, she says, “My mind stops because of the drones.”  She is in shock. In the fifth story, the statement, “God will protect us” rings hollow. In the sixth story, 600 people are dead in an hour from bombs. This image is in contrast to that of the seventh story, in which kids are busy with arts and crafts in a tent. The apparent normalcy is belied by the knowledge of the children that their respective parents have written the kids’ names on their legs so they could be identified in rubble after a bombing. The kids want their names erased, but they cannot; the chance of being bombed is too high. In the eighth story, kids make a music video. This is in juxtaposition to the teacher in the ninth story. He drops off his phone to be charged on the ground, but there not an open outlet. He waits in line for water, but it runs out shortly before it is his turn. There is no more food. That the Israeli government has intended this state of affairs can be inferred, but the documentary lacks any clips of government officials saying as much.

In the tenth story, a boy seems to go to school, but his teacher has been killed so the boy sits in a field amid collapsed cement buildings. The hardness and sheer hopelessness are palpable on the screen. In the eleventh story, a resident of Gaza heading north with three suitcases says, “I am very surprised that we survived.” In the twelfth story, a man sleeps in a body bag without even a blanket. Although he feels lucky to be alive, he is literally sleeping in a body bag. “Nothing remains of this city except the sea,” he remarks. Interestingly, he does not include even himself. He has packed himself for death as if there is nothing left to do but wait.

In the thirteenth story, a man is in the collapsed rubble of a house, with his friend’s dead body nearby, also in the rubble. It takes 1.5 hours to dig him out. Many of his family are already dead. He could even feel his parents’ bodies near him, also in the rubble. And amid all this, he says, “It’s God’s will.” Is it? In actuality, it was Netanyahu’s will—far indeed from that of any deity. Perhaps utter hopelessness breeds futility.

In the fourteenth story, a young man grieves the loss of his girlfriend, whose body is in the rubble along with her family. In the next story, a mother bathes her young daughter in a jug. In the sixteenth story, the driver of a mule-powered taxi-cart sees fighter jets overhead. No one is safe. In the next story, a displaced writer remarks of the Israelis, “No recognition of human beings.” Indeed, public statements made the press by senior government officials liken the residents of Gaza to being less than human—a sentiment that was not unheard of in Nazi Germany. In the eighteenth story, a filmmaker in Gaza wants a story of hope and music rather than despair: Say no to violence that violates human rights. Such a magnitude of destruction is a challenge for people who want to overcome despair. But is that no like pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat?

In the nineteenth story, a cousin is buried; the person loses someone each night when the bombs fall. A young woman is trapped in the rubble for six hours. Her parents, grandmother, and aunt all died. “Martyrs,” a child says. But amid wanton killing, do any of the victims even have a cause to die for? Senseless death is so unfathomable that the human mind manufactures martyrdom. It makes sense, therefore, that in the very next story, charcoal drawings that resemble survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are shown. The twenty-first story returns somewhat to normalcy in that news that a university was bombed just a week before reminds viewers of civilization even if in the past tense. “There is no longer a possibility of peace,” someone says. That line is followed by another. “It’s strange that hope is still here.” Was it? The puppet show in the last story seems surreal, as hope was absent from all of the stories.

What can viewers make of these stories that are so beyond ordinary experience? The thesis that the genocidal holocaust has gone far beyond anything that could be justified ethically and even politically even given Israel’s loss of less than 1,500 Israelis (including the hostages) is so self-evident that audio-visual support is hardly needed. Of all of the visuals, that of a man being dug out of the rubble of a house while his parents’ dead bodies are near him may be the most striking in terms of just how cruel government officials can be regarding people who are not constituents. Were Netanyahu there in person watching the man being dug out within eyesight of the man’s dead parents, would the hardened heart relent? With distance—whether that of approving military tactics that are to be used on people at a distance or of safely reading news reports abroad of atrocities in Gaza—can easily come complacency. It is this that Masharawi seems to have been challenging, but to no avail as no coalition of the willing arose from mass movements around the world to shove Israel out of Gaza (and the West Bank) in 2025. It is difficult to conclude that the documentary was successful. Rather than being an indictment of the filmmaker, it pertains to our species, which beyond street protests has stood by and let the Israeli government act with impunity. Unfortunately, impunity has not only been enjoyed by Israel internationally; our crime of indifference, which has forestalled action on behalf of the hopeless, may be inherently mired in impunity.