Daniel Nelson

Ambulance takes you right into the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014.

Newsreels at the time were vivid and shocking, with desperate people frantically searching through collapsed homes. Ambulance is even more graphic.

It’s a first-person account by 24-year-old Mohamed Jabaly from Gaza City who attaches himself to an ambulance crew – without telling his parents, who would have forbidden it – just as the conflict is about to erupt.

He has little direct experience of death and destruction, so his reactions are honest and raw. He gets through it with the support of the ambulance captain, Abu Marzouq, the cameraderie of the crew, and by concentrating on his viewfinder. Plus adrenaline.

He has written: “Even though I myself had lived through 2 wars and 2 Intifada before, nothing prepared me for my experience during the last war. Every phone call was bad news. The next call and the next… it got worse and worse. It could be my family, my neighbours. Our ambulance could be hit at any time. It was the first time in my life to be so close for a situation like this. I started to understand that each TV image is just a small part of a big story. Even though I had lived all my life in Gaza, I was shocked every day, moment to moment.”

But after one bloody incident too many, in which Marzouq is injured, Jabaly’s fears and traumas threaten to overwhelm him.

His reflections, and the ambulance crew’s quiet moments between wailing sirens, heart-stopping drives, broken bodies, the desperate dashes through hospital theatres packed with anxious relatives, make the film far more than a blood-on-the-wall action documentary. It’s a vivid, moving testimony about the ambulance team, about war, about Palestine, about a people under duress.

The film, Jabaly explains, is about “human connections and does not seek to campaign for any political party or policy, nor to assign blame. This is not because I don’t see the urgency of the political debate or the importance of accountability, but because I am a storyteller who believes that personal stories can open the way, show us what we have in common - human decency and human dignity.”

* Ambulance is showing on 26 August, followed by a Skype Q&A with Jabaly.

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