‘Gaza’s Twins, Come Back To Me’ review: Impassioned doc follows a family trying to reunite in Gaza

Dir: Mohammed Sawwaf. Palestine/Qatar/Netherlands. 2025. 96mins

Mohammad Sawwaf’s stirring documentary tells an emotional story a few mom who, within the chaos of wartime Gaza, is separated from her new child twins. And it additionally successfully makes use of this narrative to light up a topic that has been largely invisible by two years of bleak TV information bulletins: what’s it really prefer to dwell in Gaza, day after day? 

Doesn’t pull any punches

Initially commissioned as a 25-minute quick for Al Jazeera’s flagship TV documentary collection ’Witness’, Gaza’s Twins, Come Again To Me has now been prolonged to function size (a 52-minute edit might be made accessible for TV gross sales in early 2026). Sawwaf’s delicate dealing with of this topic ought to attraction to wider audiences following its premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight part.

Opening with footage of an aerial bombardment that actually shakes the digital camera out of the operator’s hand, Gaza’s Twins doesn’t pull any punches relating to charting the devastation, the struggling and the sheer weight of ordinance that has fallen on the Palestinian territory since Israel invaded in response to Hamas’ lethal assaults in October 2023. However the message that arises most strongly from Sawwaf’s second function is that hope, resourcefulness, household solidarity and the necessity for human connection are ubiquitous, even in essentially the most tough circumstances.

Sawwaf’s earlier function Eleven Days In Gaza – co-directed with Michael Winterbottom (with whom Sawwaf is presently making a follow-up, fictional function Gaza Yr Zero) and narrated by Kate Winslet – was a harrowing documentary memorial to the greater than 60 youngsters killed through the Israeli bombing of Gaza in Might 2021. Much more have died since then however, on this solo venture, Sawwaf appears decided to focus not on requiems, however resistance. Accompanied by Ali Helnwein’s mild, mood-matched soundtrack with its Arabic inflections, Gaza’s Twins flares up into unabashed sentiment throughout a heartrending late sequence – a chunk of pure cinema that’s so highly effective exactly as a result of no one is appearing.

Early on-screen captions inform us that we’re in northern Gaza shortly after the beginning of the conflict, when those that hadn’t fled south within the first few days have been trapped in an enclave steadily being lowered to rubble. Simply throughout the street from the residence that Rania shares along with her taxi-driver husband Akram and 4 youngsters we see a pile of masonry the place one other residential constructing was once; subsequent door, one other block lists drunkenly on its collapsed foundations.

The couple take turns telling the story of how Rania was eight months pregnant with triplets when the invasion started, how she gave start in a hospital that was an lively conflict zone, how one of many infants died simply after start and the opposite two, a boy and a woman, have been positioned in incubators, earlier than being evacuated south towards their dad and mom’ needs. It wasn’t till three months later that they found the twins have been being cared for in a facility in Rafah, near the strip’s border with Egypt – and Rania’s sister Nisreen, who had fled south along with her household, was dispatched to gather them.

All of a sudden we’re embedded with one other massive and clearly loving clan as nappies are modified and bottles heated up. One of many pair of twins, born severely underweight, wants particular care. There’s pathos in the truth that neither the household nor the movie make a giant factor about this – simply as there’s in our data that Rania can solely see her infants on a telephone display.

There’s little or no dialogue of politics and extra resignation than rage on present right here – however there’s additionally, maybe surprisingly, pleasure, affection and good humour, at the same time as we watch Rania and household foraging for herbs amidst the devastation, or observe Nisreen and her household as they’re compelled to maneuver repeatedly, with their acquired infants, to adjust to evacuation orders. In a single eloquent shot, Nisreen’s husband complains bitterly, as he dismantles the household’s newest tarpaulin-covered shelter – preserving the nails, as a result of they command a excessive worth – that that is the fifth time for the reason that starting of the battle that the household has needed to transfer on.

But because the partitions are actually taken down from round them, we watch his spouse and elder daughter cooing over a contented, gurgling child, this show of humanity and care the emotional and ethical centre of this shifting documentary.