A 12 minute short being expanded into a feature film, based on feature screenplay by Rafal Zielinski.

FILMMAKER STATEMENT:

This film comes from memories that have lived inside me since childhood.

When I was eleven and twelve, I lived in Cairo while my father , through the Ford Foundation worked on low cost housing projects across the Middle East. During those years, and later in my teens, we traveled extensively through Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as across Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and beyond. Later, my teenage years were spent across India, Nepal, and the Far East.

Those years shaped my senses: dawn calls to prayer echoing over rooftops, bazaars overflowing with color and sound, vast mosques, felucca sails drifting across the Nile, long afternoons riding camels and horses near the pyramids. These places felt ancient, human, alive — and endlessly open to a child’s imagination.

These impressions were simply life, seen through the wide-open eyes of a child. They left me with a deep sense of beauty, humanity, fragility, and timelessness.

Over the last two years, those memories collided with another reality I was witnessing daily: the deaths of children in war.

Numbers are debated. They shift. They are contested.

But even conservative estimates state that over 20,000 children have been reported killed last two years.

A tragedy concentrated in hours versus one unfolding relentlessly over two years.

Numbers carry weight.

This is not unique to Gaza, Ukraine, Africa, other places…

hundreds of children have been confirmed killed, thousands wounded, and countless more displaced or forcefully relocated— carrying trauma that will shape their entire lives. 

Wars differ. The suffering of children does not.

From a Buddhist-Christian-Jewish perspective, I cannot see events as isolated absolutes. Cause and effect matter. Suffering does not arise in a vacuum. An event is often treated as a singular eruption of evil, but history shows that violence is almost always the result of long accumulations of pain, fear, humiliation, and oppression. 

This is not justification — it is an attempt to understand how cycles of suffering are created, and how they repeat when left unexamined.

What troubled me deeply was this: the industry does not lack empathy for children, but it does operate under fear. Some stories are encouraged, amplified, and widely distributed, while others — are avoided, limited, or quietly suppressed.

This film is an attempt to restore balance — not through polemics or blame, but through one story.

One child, trapped under the rubble of a collapsed building, fighting to survive over three days and two nights.

It is a film about the effects of war.

About trauma, not ideology.
About a child, not nations.

The entire film is carried by one voice.

The AI-generated girl is not one child but a collective presence, her shifting image allowing the film to honor many lives without placing that burden on a single human performer.

All the dialogue — every character — was performed by a single actress. She gave the film its life and its soul. Her performance was then carefully transformed into different voices and characters, but the emotional core always remained hers. 

Visually, I wanted the film to carry beauty — not as decoration, but as memory.

Real lenses are made of layers of glass, where light scatters, reflects, and imperfectly separates into color. I treated each shot the same way — using chromatic aberrations, mist and diffusion filters, and layers of different film grain: Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, different stocks, different eras.

Each shot was approached like a painting, searching for a distinctive, tactile film look — something imperfect, luminous, and human. A way to move away from a clean, synthetic “AI look” and toward images shaped by light, accident, and emotion.

Because traditional production would make this film nearly impossible to realize — no access, no funding, no distribution without fear — I turned to AI.

Not to cheapen cinema, but to reclaim it.

To bypass gates.

To speak when silence is the norm.

Under the Rubble is not a political film. It is a human one.

Wars end. The trauma carried by children does not.

They deserve at least to be seen.