Real Lives
Bisan Owda won an Emmy for filming Gaza on her phone
Image credit: Bisan Owda — Bisan Owda / Save the Children, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 · License
Original Reporting
Every episode opens the same way: It's Bisan from Gaza, and I'm still alive.
The line became a series, the series won a News and Documentary Emmy, a Peabody and an Edward R. Murrow award in a single year, and the woman saying it was filming on a phone in a place with no electricity.
Beit Hanoun, and a poem at nine#
Bisan Owda grew up in Beit Hanoun, in the far north of the Gaza Strip. She was born in the late 1990s, which made her twenty-five or so when the war began.
She has said the whole thing started when she was nine, holding a microphone on a school stage and reading a poem aloud. She read constantly, played basketball, and was interested in astronomy — an unpromising set of hobbies for a place with a curfewed sky.
The five years nobody saw#
The important fact about Bisan Owda is that she was already a filmmaker.
For roughly five years before October 2023 she made documentary work about ordinary Gaza. Her programme Hakawatiya — the storyteller, in the feminine — travelled the strip recording its neighbourhoods, its crafts, its heritage and its food. She produced for Jordan's Roya TV, made educational videos, and worked on projects with the United Nations Population Fund.
That archive is now a record of places that no longer exist, made by someone who filmed them because she loved them rather than because they were about to be destroyed.
The series#
It's Bisan from Gaza and I'm Still Alive was made for AJ+, Al Jazeera's digital arm, and it worked because it refused the grammar of war reporting.
There is no anchor, no studio, no expert. There is a young woman walking through a displacement camp explaining how people are getting water today, what flour costs, where the queue for the toilet forms, which of her neighbours is still alive.
In 2024 it won:
- the News and Documentary Emmy for outstanding hard news feature, short form
- a Peabody Award in the news category
- an Edward R. Murrow Award for news series
Few journalists collect that combination in a career. She did it in one year, from inside the story.
The campaign against the nomination#
Before the Emmys, pro-Israel organisations campaigned to have her nomination withdrawn, circulating claims about her political affiliations drawn from old social media activity.
Owda rejected the characterisation, and Al Jazeera stood by her and by the work. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences did not rescind the nomination, and the jury gave her the award.
The episode is worth recording because it is now a familiar pattern for Palestinian journalists who win things. It is not, however, what the prize was for.
What she actually changed#
Owda's series arrived at the moment the profession's oldest arrangement broke down. Foreign correspondents could not enter Gaza. The people who could report it were the people living it.
She showed that this is not a lesser form of journalism. It has better access, better sourcing and a narrower margin for error, because the audience includes her neighbours.
It's Bisan from Gaza, and I'm still alive.
She is a filmmaker who was documenting her home long before anyone outside it was watching, and who kept the camera steady when they finally did.
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