October 7, 2023 changed the Middle East forever. Our objective was to portray what ‘ordinary’ life had become for Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip, as Israel’s retaliatory war on the besieged enclave dramatically intensified over the weeks that followed. Our premise was simple: ask a wide range of people in Gaza, that we could make contact with, to record themselves over the course of a day, whatever they could manage, on any device that still worked. Because who better to tell the stories of life there than the people themselves who are living through it? Our overarching goal as Al Jazeera’s digital documentary strand was to produce something with ‘staying power’. We set out to create a viewing experience that would deeply resonate with our audience and leave an emotional imprint in their minds, one that lingers longer than the usual short-lived shock or outrage from the briefest of snapshots. We felt this was important as this is a war that is being witnessed by the outside world largely via social media, where videos of air strikes and atrocities fill people’s feeds and disappear as quickly as they come. We hoped the film would convey and convince viewers of the horror of war and the unimaginable hardship that people in Gaza were experiencing as a result.
Our plan felt audacious to the point of unfeasibility. We were seeking user-generated content from ‘users’ who no longer had reliable access to food, water, electricity, internet, fuel, and who needed to be fully preoccupied with trying to survive under relentless bombardment. So executing our strategy was far more challenging than our usual production workflows. It required persistence, patience, adaptability and sensitivity in order to source material from Palestinians in the midst of this war. Much of Gaza’s telecoms infrastructure was damaged or inoperable by that point and so obtaining video files from would-be contributors was fraught with difficulty. To assist, we hired two young women who were key to the execution of the project: a well-connected, digitally-savvy Palestinian organiser living in London, and a journalist based in the Gaza Strip. Both helped us find participants from different walks of life and provided them guidance with filming and physically assisted with uploading and transferring footage to us.
After gathering hundreds of clips, we worked hard to weave them into a cohesive narrative, and after much experimentation, we settled on a dawn to dusk storyline punctuated by the Islamic prayer times. Our compilation of people’s personal moments, woven seamlessly into a nine-minute film, provides a compelling snapshot of one single day out of the more than 300 of the conflict thus far, where even the most mundane of tasks - such as showering or preparing a meal - have become near impossible. Viewers get an emotive glimpse into the daily challenges faced by those who shared their private moments with us and the world; moments that could have been their last. The film serves as a time capsule of life during the early weeks of a war with the grim accolade, according to Oxfam, of having an average daily death toll that exceeds any other conflict in the 21st century.
The film’s impact in terms of social engagement and viewer response was unprecedented. The statistics almost speak for themselves. On Instagram, it garnered 13M views, reached 8.6M accounts, received 267k likes, 125k shares, and 46k saves, making it comfortably one of Al Jazeera English’s strongest performing videos of all time on social media. On X, it surpassed 2.2M views and 14k retweets, again reaching viral status and confirming that its appeal wasn’t an aberration of one particular platform. But what convinced us most that we had succeeded in accomplishing what we set out to achieve was the qualitative feedback found in more than 5,700 comments on Instagram. Message after message of heartbreak, of gratitude, of viewers galvanised to speak out and demand peace.
The strength of the film's engagement taught us that audiences have a desire for raw, personal stories that go beyond the headlines and allow one to ‘feel’ a news event, as it's unfolding in real time, rather than just knowing something intellectually after the fact. It also demonstrated that audiences have an appetite to consume and engage with much longer vertical content than is typically assumed, as long as the storytelling is compelling.
Ultimately, we believe our Close Up film ‘One Day in Gaza’ resonated because, through user-generated content, we managed to convey universal themes of love, survival, heartbreak, and death in arguably the most authentic way possible; and offered an unfiltered exploration of what life looks like when life itself is at stake.
