The shorts are as brief as they can be, scraping at particular, everyday horrors. There’s no need to establish a large, epic span of narrative. That the civilians remain clutching onto resilience is in itself extraordinary. To live in a war zone is to endure artillery of violence, an assault that defies imagination. Your senses are numbed. Ears start ringing with the pervasive noise of drones, long after they have vanished from the sky. People wear headphones to block out the sound, real and imagined. Privacy stands forfeited. The act of dreaming gets stranded between the delusional and vital self-sustenance. What is dignity if it is pushed out into crevices of bare survival? In Sorry, Cinema, director Ahmad Hassunah wistfully talks about being unable to create fiction films. He couldn’t even travel with the one he managed to make. As the situation in his home country tightened, filmmaking itself had to be abandoned. Now life is a marathon, he says, of escaping bombs, rubble. Days are spent chasing spare mercies of aid planes, scouring for food for his family. Flour tumbled off vehicles is scrounged off the ground.