🇵🇸Palestinian Film Fest 2024 Review - Gaza Surf Club

Images courtesy of Original Spin.

Philip Gnadt and Mickey Yamine’s 2016 film Gaza Surf Club tells the story of several Palestinians and their relationship with the sea. Each of them finds a form of liberation while surfing. We see their struggle to form a thriving surf club whilst living under Israeli occupation.

 I could mention how this film is well shot with an excellent soundtrack. We could focus on how the film’s slice of life style fails to provide much regional or political context. However, such cinematic critique feels wrong in the face of the genocide that Gaza is currently facing.

Since the most recent bombardment of Gaza began on October 27th 2023, over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed and millions displaced. Gaza City, in which most of this film takes place, is now practically uninhabitable rubble. With the majority of Gaza’s population now crammed into Rafa and a ground invasion by the IDF ever looming, it seems as though there is only further genocide in the future of Palestine. 

After watching Gaza Surf Club (2016), I immediately wanted to find out how the people shown in the film had fared in this, the most recent atrocity committed against them and their homes. Ibrahim Arafat, whose escape to Hawaii we see in the film, now lives in America but his family home in Gaza has been destroyed and his family displaced. Mohammed Abo Jayab, who founded the original Gaza Surf Club, has had his house bombed and he and his daughter have been medivac-ed to Qatar, where his daughters leg has had to be amputated.

While Gaza Surf Club (2016) may lack political context within itself, it does work well to provide historical context now. The documentary took 5 years to make and was most likely shot in-between the 2012 operation by Israel, Pillar of Defence, and the 2014 Operation Protective Edge. We see throughout, the rubble and absolute destruction left by Operation Pillar of Defence. We are shown the hard life Palestinians are forced to live whilst under Israeli occupation. Bits of broken buildings litter their streets, and concrete and rebar adorns their shore. Gaza Surf Club (2016) shows us that this most recent attack by Israel is nothing new; just another step in the ongoing genocide started when Israel was founded in 1948.  

The extent to which Israeli occupation penetrates the lives of Palestinians is demonstrated through one of the central conflicts of the film: procuring surfboards. They do not have the machinery required to build modern fiberglass surfboards within Gaza and, seemingly for no reason, the Israeli customs agents prevent most of them from being shipped into Gaza. The state of Israel controls everything that enters the Gaza Strip, from building supplies to surfboards; even measuring food going in by the calorie so that only the bare minimum is available. We saw an even more destructive example of this barbaric border policy only a few weeks ago, when Israel stopped an aid shipment of medical supplies entering the strip. They claim that this was because of the scissors in the medical packs being possibly used as weapons. 

In her book The Story of Palestine (2020), Vashti Fox refers to the tendency to describe Palestinians with the word “sumud.” As she describes it, “It means ‘steadfast’ and refers to the seemingly unbreakable determination of the Palestinian people to survive and resist.” (Pp.87). I think this concept of sumud runs through Gaza Surf Club (2016). Despite the constant pressure of Israeli occupation, the people of Gaza still stand steadfast, attempting to live their life to its fullest. I just hope that one day they will be able to do so in a free Palestine: from the river to the sea. 

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Gaza Surf Club is screening as part of the 2024 Palestinian Film Festival. For tickets and more info, click here.

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