A man walks past a handcart parked between a patchwork of gravel and a row of corrugated shelters. An orange explosion of dust and smoke lights up the distance, just beyond the shelter roofs — going by the reactions, it’s nothing exceptional. No one runs, flinches or even bothers to look at the ball of light. The disquieting thing about the scene is how ordinary the film makes it feel.
Thirteen in Gaza, which is screening as part of TIFF’s Centrepiece programme, was filmed inside Gaza, and is the first fiction feature shot within the territory in 12 years. Made during wartime conditions with a small crew who had very little freedom of movement, the drama sometimes exposes those constraints. The audio mixing can be uneven, letting in environmental sounds that can be distracting during conversations. The cuts and choice of angles can also seem rough, though the film manages to competently capture the most important aspects for the viewer.
A brutal sense of place dictates nearly every detail. Viewers are brought to Gaza while it is under Israeli bombardment and a neverending siege, because that distinction matters to what the film is trying to understand. Director Hosam Abu Dan’s central preoccupation, after all, lies in what happens to ordinary life when catastrophe becomes routine.
Over a Zoom call from Gaza, briefly interrupted when his connection dropped, Abu Dan tells The Grind through a translator that he wanted to capture “the small details” lost beneath images of “war, destruction, and casualties.”
But Abu Dan’s Gaza speaks for itself, too: through the constant presence of airplanes and drones humming between conversations, in the everyday calculus of procuring water and food, and by thirteen-year-old Raghad (Mary Ziyara), who searches for some privacy to deal with her first period. An active genocide isn’t the subject here, but the conditions it creates and how it shapes everything around it.
The central theme of this story is the relationship between Raghad and her father, Abu Raghad (Firas Al-Masri), as they navigate a world of shrinking options. He tries to protect his daughter while around them the people who can provide begin to appear differently. As food, work and protection grows scarce, the men who are able to provide gain a different kind of stranglehold.
For Abu Dan, the images that have travelled furthest from Gaza are often incomplete. The media, he says, only represents Gaza through violence. “Killing there, bombardment there,” he says. “But there’s another story for the human beings living there.” He describes the less visible ways war can change people and entire communities, changes “we cannot see in the news or in documentaries.”
In Abu Dan’s telling, the inspiration for Thirteen in Gaza began not with an explosion, but with a bathroom key. After he was displaced by Israel’s attacks, and forced to move from Khan Younis to Rafah, a girl of about thirteen or fourteen approached the small shared toilet near his tent and asked if she could use it. “Her home was bombed,” he recalls. “She was with her injured mother in the hospital, and she got her first period.”
Privacy was, and still is, one of war’s quieter casualties. A first period, typically a private thing between a girl and her changing body, becomes a greater problem of circumstance: finding a toilet, standing in a lengthy line, searching for material to hide the bleeding. Abu Dan understood the indignity as its own kind of evidence through which Palestinian life is dehumanized.
“What kind of situation is this, that a young girl has to go searching for a toilet just to deal with this alone?” Abu Dan recalls thinking.
“How can I show to the outer world what is happening?” Abu Dan says, “And show them how we are affected by this, not only by what they see, but in how it affects our normal lives?”
In the film, Raghad is still a child, and her body announces its growth before she’s ready for what it actually means. Puberty becomes the introductory thing, but as her physical world changes, the Palestinian filmmaker shifts the lens to questions of work, food and protection. Her father loves his daughter so much that he begins to police her, while Khalil (Ghassan Salem), a local trader profiting from the wartime economy, somehow has an answer for all three.
Abu Dan’s closeness to many of these issues carried into the film’s casting. Most actors were already friends and colleagues from his earlier work — short films, documentaries and television production, including his 2025 short, Gaza Sound Man. When he saw Ziyara again after her own displacement, something was different. “She changed,” he says. “She really grew up.” He could suddenly see Raghad in her.
Salem had been impacted more brutally. The actor had been displaced for two years and was living in a tent. “He lost everything [including] members of his family.” That biography gives his performance as Khalil an uncomfortable duality: an actor who lost so much, now playing someone who uses his power to take from others.
Khalil carries the film to a morally harsh place. His character offers an example of how desperation can elevate a man who is willing to use his ability as a form of leverage over people with fewer choices. He controls increasingly scarce food supplies, but that power reaches beyond what people need into who gets to stay, who gets to remain alive, and whose bodies are treated as another thing he can take.
“In every war, you can see the worst in people,” Abu Dan says. “Society collapses. Bad people take advantage of what’s happening.” Thirteen in Gaza resists the urge to treat shared suffering as moral purification. Victimhood is shared, but power isn’t.
Before the war, Abu Dan had been preparing a different film featuring Palestinians in Gaza, one about “all the beautiful things that they used to have and how they lived before,” he says. He imagined travelling outside Gaza with his work, showing it at festivals, meeting other filmmakers.
Thirteen in Gaza belong to a different artistic trajectory, one guided by circumstances imposed on filmmakers like him. As of our interview, Abu Dan has yet to leave Gaza since the war began in 2023.
This article appeared in the 2026 Oct/Nov issue.
