In the ruins of Gaza, a group of young circus performers insists on laughter as a form of survival. Dayel ‘Anna ‘Ard (One More Show, 2025) follows members of the Gaza Free Circus in the months after October 2023 as they stage performances for children amid bombed neighborhoods and overcrowded shelters, offering fleeting moments of joy for an enclave defeated by loss, fear, and uncertainty.
Filmed in July 2024, when Gaza was under the heaviest bombardment in its history, the Egyptian-Palestinian feature-length documentary marks the first feature film for its directors, Egyptian filmmaker Mai Saad, and Palestinian co-director and cinematographer, Ahmed Al-Danf.
The performers, including Yousef Khader, Mohamed Ayman, Mohamed Obeid (known as Just), Ahmed Zeyara (known as Batout), Ismail Farhat, and other circus artists, refuse to succumb to despair and travel across Gaza staging shows for children.
The film examines the power of laughter amid constant danger. Its emotional core alternates between circus performances of juggling, clowning, singing, and dancing, and intimate conversations among the performers themselves.
While the circus scenes recur with limited visual or conceptual variation, providing a warm tone for the film, the interview segments with the group members trust the inherent events of their subjects’ lives to show their struggle to the audience.
In makeshift venues built atop the rubble of destroyed homes or inside schools turned into emergency shelters, the artists summon exuberance for an audience of children who, for a brief moment, are allowed to forget the war surrounding them.
The joy, however, is temporary. When the show ends, the performers return to a shared room where they sleep on thin mattresses on the floor, cut off from their families and any real sense of stability. There, the film sheds its outward cheer and settles into the heavy and quiet accumulation of personal loss.
One performer longs for a reliable internet connection, enough to watch his young child sleeping during a video call. Another had returned to Gaza shortly before the war to get engaged, only to find himself trapped by the bombardment, unable to leave or reunite with his fiancée. Their stories differ in detail but converge in themes of arbitrary loss, relentless anxiety, and a future clouded by fear.
Al-Danf’s camera lingers on the performers’ most modest dreams. One performer hopes only for a cease-fire long enough to sleep uninterrupted, without the terror of waking to an airstrike. Another voices a wish shaped by the conditions of war, hoping that when death comes, his body will remain intact, sparing others the task of gathering his remains.
The artists spend their days rehearsing and performing, and their nights waiting. When their location gets bombarded, they flee, rushing to help others. In quieter moments, they pass the hours sharing memories, imagining futures that feel increasingly abstract, or speaking of loved ones, living and dead.
Like many Palestinians under siege, they have become reluctant political analysts, parsing events and searching for logic in chaos that resists explanation.
The power of Dayel ‘Anna ‘Ard lies largely in its proximity to suffering that audiences around the world have witnessed in fragments through phone screens, news alerts, and social media feeds. That immediacy lends the film an emotional weight that can feel resistant to critique, making it difficult to evaluate form, pacing, or structure in a work that documents real lives lived under constant threat.
The film’s central achievement bears witness to a form of resistance that does not announce itself as such. The Gaza Free Circus does not promise escape or salvation. It offers momentary suspension of despair, one more show, performed as if tomorrow were still imaginable.
That insistence resonated deeply with Cairo audiences. On 13 November, Dayel ‘Anna ‘Ard had its first public screening at the Grand Theater in the Cairo Opera House as part of the Official Competition at the 46th Cairo International Film Festival. The film also won two awards at the Cairo Festival on 21 November— the Audience Award, the Youssef Chahine Rizkallah Award, and the Directing Award as part of the Next Generation Awards in collaboration with The Film Verdict.
It received a USD 15,000 (EGP 70,991) prize, awarded by audience vote, and the filmmakers announced it will go toward rebuilding the Gaza Free Circus Center, the very institution at the heart of the film.
Dayel ‘Anna ‘Ard also globally premiered in Italy, where it competed in the Official Selection of the Rome International Documentary Film Festival on 4 December, and received the Audience and Best Production Awards on 9 December. The film has also been chosen for the official out-of-competition program at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, which takes place from 13 to 20 December.
In a war defined by erasure, “One More Show” argues quietly, stubbornly, for presence, laughter, memory, and for the fragile persistence of art when everything else has been stripped away.
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