Angel of Gaza
A 10-year Malak narrates her family's arduous journey of romance, sacrifice and reunification with her father, in the US, after 7-year of forced separation. Angel of Gaza is a close-up portrait of a Palestinian child from Gaza and how they see the world around them.
A 10-year Malak narrates her family's arduous journey of romance, sacrifice and reunification with her father, in the US, after 7-year of forced separation. Angel of Gaza is a close-up portrait of a Palestinian child from Gaza and how they see the world around them.
Support this ProjectAngel of Gaza is about the story of a Gazan family’s experience with war, separation, and diaspora through a focus on the family’s young daughter. Malak, a charismatic and articulate child, is seven when we first meet her in Gaza where, with her mother and younger brother she has lived through the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza, the departure of her father for the United States when she was just two years old, the Great March of Return, a series of weekly nonviolent protests by Gazans calling for their right to return to their lands in what is today Israel, and the highly restrictive and arbitrary control at the crossing point in Israel. The film then follows her family’s journey from Gaza to the United States to reunite with her father..
Ahmed Mansour is an emerging independent documentary filmmaker based in NYC. An NYU graduate, Ahmed was born and raised in a refugee camp in The Gaza Strip, Palestine where he worked as an organizer and translator for journalists covering the 2014 war. The trauma of being under military siege informs his filmmaking and his plight to bring to light underrepresented stories of Palestine across the diaspora. He is best known for his 2019 hit Brooklyn Inshallah.
Family separation is in the news in a big way when it comes to the issue of immigration. As American leaders grapple with the impact such an experience has on children, and what such treatment says about how a nation values family, this story of forced family separation and re-union gives viewers insight into this experience and shows this as the everyday and historic reality of the Palestinian people.
As a refugee from Gaza, I have grown up through wars and seen the impact of families torn apart and families driven from their homes, I am a filmmaker who knows this experience from the inside. I am also a native Arab speaker who understands the challenge of translating a Gaza story into the language of word and image that American audiences can grasp.
Rashad Saleh is a Palestinian-American filmmaker. A graduate of Oberlin College, his documentary work has appeared in festivals and publications across the United States. His 2016 short The Man Hit the Donkey screened at the Social Justice Film Festival and the Arab Film Festival at the Arab American National Museum, and he is currently developing his debut feature documentary We Don’t Talk About Palestine which was selected for Ramallah Doc 2019 and participated in the 2020 Sheffield Docfest as a part of the Palestinian Delegation. Most Recently, his coverage of the George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon featured in The Oregonian.
Jillian Karole is an NYC based distribution and outreach producer, specializing in creative distribution strategies for the digital age to independent filmmakers. She has worked with major film festivals around the world including Sundance, Outfest, Tribeca, & Berlin, to bring films that target marginalized stories to their audiences. She is also involved with the New School’s Engage Media Lab that works with youth media groups around the city to instruct students on how to create their own content and in conscious media literacy practices. She also specializes in data based marketing strategies for new media and socially engaged content.
Paul Costello, founder of storywise.com and New Story Leadership Inc, is a pioneer in developing the method and practice of story-driven change. He has collaborated with leaders from the World Bank, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Department of Homeland Security, USGA and other national and international organizations helping them realize the power of story. He has taken his unique approach into other diverse fields such as peace making programs for emerging leaders from South Africa, Israel and Palestine and Northern Ireland. He has also produced short films covering untold stories of Washington DC and Jerusalem and been the occasional producer of live shows at the Kennedy Center and the Shakespeare Theater. As creative director behind many projects, his special skill is working with people to help them find and shape their most transformative stories for stage and screen and for community empowerment.
Nancy Kalow is a folklorist and filmmaker who has taught at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies since 2000. Her documentary, Sadobabies, was the winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Special Jury Trophy at the San Francisco Film Festival. She was a co-convener, with miriam cooke and Maha Houssami, of the Mellon Humanities Writ Large project, Arab Refugee Oral History: Collecting Life Narratives. Her e-book, Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary was published by CDS.
