The Phoenix of Gaza XR – VR experience

The interactive extended reality project The Phoenix of Gaza can be visited for free throughout the festival at the entry of Filmhuis Den Haag. For exact opening hours, check the programme schedule below.

The Phoenix of Gaza XR is an interactive VR experience, capturing the untold stories of Gaza’s people and its transformation. Dive deep into the lives of those who endured and rebuilt. It’s more than VR — it’s a testament to resilience.

The project includes hundreds of videos and images using 360-degree camera of daily activities in Gaza and the majority of historical places in the Gaza Strip before it was destroyed (about 80% of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed since October 7, 2023). The material includes images and videos of historical monuments, cultural sites, public squares, universities, schools, cafes, streets, agricultural areas, parks, beach, markets, and amusement places. This is in addition to capturing Palestinian culture through weddings, stitching workshops, dabke (traditional dance), palm harvesting, clay and pottery making, and other hand-made professions.

VR stands for Virtual Reality. It is a technology that places you in a digital, fully virtual environment.

This screening is hosted by the research project Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament.

The Genesis of the Phoenix of Gaza XR Project

”This project started in 2022 when Naim Aburaddi, an MA student in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) at the time, received the 2021 CSUSB xReal Lab fellowship, where he started working with Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb who was a faculty fellow at the lab. Out of Naim’s inability to visit Gaza (6 years at that time) and his yearning to feel, touch, smell, and relive his cherished memories in Gaza, this project was born.

The team decided to hire a camera operator in Gaza and it took 6 months to get a Theta 360-degree camera into Gaza. Between July 2022 and July 2023, our videographer kept on documenting life in Gaza with two objectives in mind:

First, to capture Gaza outside the realm of death and destruction and to show the multiplicity of Gaza, introducing the multi-dimensional realities there. We wanted to capture happy moments and mundane life activities; to show how people resist in their resilience and insistence on making life out of the brutal Israeli siege, we captured places and faces that no longer exist in the geography of Gaza.

Second, we wanted to imagine a liberated Gaza in virtual spaces we built with the help of a team of technicians and 3-D designers from the xReal Lab at CSUSB. We replicated the building of the Pasha Palace after we filmed its structure which does not exist anymore, then we deposited many of the happy moments there in a virtual model of Gaza.

This project was also experimental, but no one had never imagined that we were capturing history! A project that was supposed to imagine a liberated Gaza turned into a heritage preservation one and documentary evidence of the genocide, taking into consideration that many of the places we captured had been on the UNESCO heritage list. Lately, we were able to hire a videographer to capture the aftermath of many of our content.”