“They Wanted the World to Know What They Were Going Through”

A Day in the Tent (workshops of Haneen Koraz)

Where is the last place you might think of stop motion being created on the planet right now? What about Gaza, Deir al-Balah city in the southern humanitarian zone?

Haneen Koraz started a stop motion workshop with the help of Nour A-Jawad and Shorouq Darwish. In that tumultuous place the workshop that was set up for girls to express their daily experiences. As you can imagine there are many stories to be told in such a situation. The workshop gives a little reprieve from the every day struggles for those who attend. Some big and some small.

One such story of a participants experience was recounted by Haneen who says:

"One particular story touched me [Noor] because the participants were doing a lot of storytelling. We showed the children a movie, asking them to think of hopes and dreams and go from there. We were expecting somebody to say that they hoped the war ends or something, and one child simply said they wished for a bar of chocolate, because chocolate was non-existent in Gaza for a while, or sugar at all—we couldn’t eat anything sweet. We do a lot of storytelling, focused on listening and doing things from the ground up. We give the kids a keyword around which to build something and to go forward. There are a lot of emotions—anger, sadness, empathy, pity, fear. But random things would inspire some of the animations, like one on eggs. There were no eggs—so they couldn’t bake anything and couldn’t eat any. It was a lot of things like this [that they began animating]—versus being afraid of the sounds of the drones and planes. All of these feelings intersected with where they were living. However, we are lucky because we still have homes that haven’t been bombed, whereas a lot of kids and participants are either in tents or refuge spots that are in schools, for instance. It adds layers to the feelings and complications of the emotions."

One video description from the workshop YouTube channel goes on to say:

"Despite all the bombing, destruction, hunger, and suffering that haunts us day after day, we have not stopped creating.

We continue to offer art workshops for children across the Gaza Strip, striving to grant them moments of joy and self-expression.

We create animated films with them, not just as a means of entertainment but as a tool for change. We help them transform their ideas into visual stories, teaching them that art can be a voice that speaks for them in the face of all this destruction.

Our artistic work is a way to tell the world that, despite the pain, we still seek beauty, we still dream, and we are still building a better future."

If you would like to help, there are two ways you can do so directly. One is through Patreon and one is GoFundMe.

Zippyframes has the full interview with Haneen that we snipped a part of for our post above. It covers everything in much more depth and has some pictures too. If you'd like to learn more, read the full interview by clicking here. The BBC also created a video showing the workshop staff and attendees working on their projects here. Haneen has a YouTube channel you can subscribe to here.