Director Ahmed Hassouna turns the camera toward the person usually standing behind it in Citizen Osama (Al Mowaten Osama). Set in besieged northern Gaza, the documentary follows Osama, a photographer-turned-war journalist navigating an impossible duality: recording the destruction around him while trying to protect his wife and newborn child from it.
The film began not with an abstract idea about war, but with proximity according to Hassouna. As the number of journalists remaining in northern Gaza dwindled, he found himself increasingly close to Osama, watching a colleague become a friend, and a new father learn what responsibility means when food, medicine and safety can no longer be taken for granted. What emerged was a story that moved beyond the familiar image of the war correspondent and into the private spaces rarely seen on the news: the home, the family, the moments when a journalist puts down the camera because being a father must come first.
Filmed over more than a year under conditions that repeatedly threatened both the people on screen and the footage itself, Citizen Osama is as much about preserving a life as documenting a conflict. Through Osama, Hassouna asks a deceptively simple question: who is the human being behind the image? The answer is found not only in courage, but in fear, hunger, tenderness and the painful realization that even those expected to bear witness are themselves living through the story they are trying to tell.
AM: Osama is not only the subject of the film; he is also a close friend. When did you realize that his experience deserved to be documented in a documentary?
Ahmed Hassouna: In fact, Osama was a colleague of mine at the beginning of the war, and as the war continued, we became closer, especially because there were very few journalists left in northern Gaza after the Israeli army issued evacuation leaflets urging residents of Gaza City to move south. There were very few journalists remaining in the north, which allowed me to get closer to many of them and observe their lives and experiences firsthand. I was particularly following Osama and witnessing what he was going through day after day.
When Osama became trapped under siege, and especially when his first child was born, I began to realize that there was a human story that went far beyond his identity as a journalist. He had married before the war, and suddenly he was experiencing fatherhood for the first time under extraordinary circumstances: war, siege, shortages of food and medicine, limited medical care, and the absence of any sense of safety. At that moment, I felt that Osama’s experience could open a window onto another side of the war: the human being we see on the news as a journalist, but whose life at home, as a husband, a father, and a human being, we rarely see. That was where the idea for the film began.
AM: How did your friendship with Osama shape the intimacy of the film, and how did you maintain the necessary distance to tell his story safely?
Ahmed Hassouna: When we began to develop a shared artistic and intellectual understanding around making the film, I told Osama from the beginning that this would not be a project filmed over just a few days. It would be a long journey in which we would live through the details of his life over time. In reality, the filming continued for more than a year. Our close relationship allowed me to recognize the important aspects of Osama’s life that needed to be shown, not only the journalist we see on television, but also the human being and the father trying to protect his family and provide for them under extraordinary circumstances.
At the same time, it was essential to maintain a safe distance, especially because northern Gaza was experiencing continuous and extremely dangerous events, and journalists themselves were exposed to significant risks. For that reason, we chose not to build the film solely around the major events experienced by journalists. Instead, we placed the family at the heart of the story: how Osama tries to become a father for the first time while also working as a journalist in an extremely dangerous environment, trying to provide for his family while documenting what is happening around him.
AM: What ethical considerations guided you when filming this personal suffering, particularly the intimate moments involving Osama’s wife and infant child?
Ahmed Hassouna: As time passed and we became closer to Osama and his family, I became more aware of when it was appropriate to film and when we needed to step back and respect the privacy of a particular moment. Osama’s family was fully aware of the film and the nature of the project, and that was extremely important to us. There were intimate moments that simply could not be turned into filmed material, even if they were important to the story.
Sometimes something dangerous would happen nearby, and Osama, despite being a journalist, would choose to be a father first, to protect his family rather than film the event. For me, that was an essential part of the story.
We therefore carefully chose when to film the intimate scenes involving his wife and child. We also made use of footage Osama recorded himself on his phone, particularly during highly personal moments such as periods of siege or displacement. This material was extremely valuable because it gave us access to moments when it was neither safe nor appropriate for us to be physically present with a camera. In some circumstances, the presence of a camera or filming equipment could draw attention to the family and increase the risks around them.
AM: Under the siege and extremely dangerous conditions in northern Gaza, how were the images recorded, transferred, preserved, and assembled into the film?
Ahmed Hassouna: Filming under those circumstances involved a real risk, not only to Osama’s family, but also to me and my own family as the director of the film. We did everything we could to protect the footage. We stored the material on multiple hard drives so that the loss of one drive would not mean losing the entire film. Some of the footage Osama recorded on his phone also remained safely stored and, fortunately, was not deleted or damaged.
I particularly remember two incidents during the making of the film. The first happened after we had filmed a significant part of the film and had begun assembling and editing the material in Gaza. I received a direct phone call from an Israeli military officer, who ordered me to evacuate my home immediately and told me that the house next to ours was going to be targeted. I was forced to evacuate the house, make sure my family was safe, and leave the area. After the neighboring house was bombed, we returned to our home. There was damage to our own house as a result of the bombing, but fortunately, the footage and the storage devices were still in place and had not been damaged.
The second incident happened during the final days, during the last displacement from the eastern part of Gaza. I received a phone call from an Israeli intelligence officer ordering me to evacuate the house immediately, and we were forced to leave. I later returned to the house, even though the danger was still present. The film’s footage was still in Gaza, and returning to retrieve it meant preserving more than a year of work, not simply protecting files or hard drives. These circumstances became part of the filmmaking experience itself. We were trying to film and protect the footage at the same time, while everything around us was vulnerable to destruction or loss at any moment.
AM: As the film reaches international audiences, what do you hope viewers will understand about Osama and about the resilience and humanity of people living through war?
Ahmed Hassouna: For me, Osama represents Palestinian journalists who lived through the war in Gaza City and northern Gaza. I chose him not only to tell his own story, but also to create space for a broader conversation about the experience of Palestinian journalists who lived through the war in all its dimensions and faced killing, pursuit, and enormous risks while doing their work.
More than 266 Palestinian journalists have been killed to date, and through Osama I wanted to ask a simple question: Who is the person behind the camera? Who is the journalist who remained in northern Gaza and lived through all of these circumstances? Osama was not experiencing the war as an outside observer. He lived through hunger, destruction, and fear. He also experienced fatherhood under circumstances that sometimes made him feel incapable of protecting his child or providing even the most basic necessities for his family.
That is where the importance of Citizen Osama lies. The film is not only about the journalist covering a war; it is about the human being behind the journalist, the father, the husband, and the citizen who is living through the same war as everyone else. I hope audiences will see Osama as a human being before seeing him as a journalist, and understand that what he experienced was not simply a news story on a screen, but an entire life lived by real people.
AM: Finally, how do you feel about participating in the Venice Film Festival this year?
Ahmed Hassouna: It is an incredible feeling, and one that makes us deeply proud. But at the same time, the emotions are very complicated. We made this film from within our own suffering. We were not documenting a distant war or someone else’s experience. We were documenting our own lives, our own suffering, and our experience as journalists and parents living through war, hunger, destruction, and constant insecurity.
There were moments when we felt that we had even lost the sense of being fathers who could protect our children. Sometimes your child looks at you believing that you are a superhero, someone who can protect them from anything, while in reality you cannot even give them something as simple as a packet of biscuits.
That is why the pride of bringing this film to Venice is intertwined with all of these memories and emotions: blood, hunger, fear, oppression, and loss, and at the same time, the determination to create a film out of all of it. I hope the film gives audiences the opportunity to see what they cannot always see on the news: the human being behind the image, the life behind the headline, and what it means to actually live through this experience rather than simply watch it.