'Gaza' wins the Goya for Best Short Documentary and brings the Palestinian conflict back to the news

The authors of this vindictive cinematographic piece are Julio Pérez del Campo and Carlos Volver Martínez, who, upon collecting the award, starred in a speech in which they called to put “the Palestinian conflict on the current map”.

Gaza took the Goya for Best Documentary Short. The authors of this vindictive cinematographic piece are Julio Pérez del Campo and Carlos Volver Martínez, who starred, upon collecting the Goya, in a speech in which they called to put “the Palestinian conflict on the current map” and opposed the celebration of the next Eurovision Song Contest in Israel.

Julio Pérez explains that "the documentary has been self-financed and has had to overcome several censorship attempts. It is terrible that it has to be like this but in this case it is a choral project of people who have worked altruistically. I want to have a memory for all of them."
Filming outside of Spain also meant adding a complication to this project that began to take shape in 2014. Carlos Volver says that "we embarked on this adventure without any experience but with the idea of telling the story from a human perspective without taking into account the repercussions or the path it could have in the film circuit. We did it from the hope."

The two directors of this short filmed in the Gaza Strip, where they knew they were taking risks, although they assure that "at no time did we have a sense of danger. We did in Israel. In any case, we were always encouraged by a touch of madness."

Part of that madness was entering Gaza using the status of one of them as a professor and claiming as the reason for the visit that they were going to do an agricultural study. Carlos Volver says that "when we entered under that premise we could not bring professional equipment and we used SLR cameras and relatively small microphones. The difficulty is that they could not catch us using equipment other than the one we would have to bring for the task we supposedly had."

El cierre del documental fue la parte más difícil porque como narran sus autores “el enfrentarse a tener que decidir qué dejas fuera después de haber vivido historias intensas resulta complicado. La cuestión es transmitirle al espectador toda esa dureza en menos de veinte minutos”.

El Goya a Gaza es la guinda a un exitoso recorrido de año y medio por festivales de renombre. Con lo que sueñan ahora sus autores es con que se incremente la difusión del mismo porque consideran que “la temática de los derechos humanos lo vale”.