“One More Show”: Seven madmen save the world

In a future unburdened by the memories of now, audiences will revisit “One More Show” (2025) and ask questions that transcend borders: What compels artists to create? And what kind of world do they see?

How do artists see themselves—and the world?

“One More Show” begins like many documentaries born of catastrophe, turning memory into image to resist erasure. But it doesn’t stop there. It digs deeper, posing a quiet, urgent question: What compels artists to create, when stripped of fame, livelihood, or recognition?

That question finds its sharpest edge in southern Gaza, a place where mornings begin with body counts and nights fall with the fear they may be the last. In such a landscape, the impulse to create isn’t abstract—it’s visceral, inevitable. Art here is not commentary. It’s a question asked from within the wreckage: What does it mean to make something, in the middle of all this?

The film resists every temptation to preach. No one gazes into the camera to deliver grand statements about “art and resistance,” and no one poses as a savior. It lets the artists speak through action, not ideology.

Foregrounding art, backgrounding destruction

Ahmed Al-Danaf, a Gazan photographer and co-director, holds the camera not as an observer but as a fellow traveler. Though not part of the Gaza Free Circus, he moves with them—inside their world, not outside it.

Perhaps he never paused to ask why he films. Perhaps Mai Saad, co-directing from Cairo, didn’t ask either. Those questions often surface later—in festival Q&As or grant proposals. But inside the film, there is no room for theorizing. There is only action. Only art.

The circus members—Youssef Khedr, Mohamed Ayman, Mohamed Obaid (Just), Ahmed Ziyara (Batout), Ismail Farhat, Mohamed Al-Akhras, and Ashraf Khedr—are not just performers. They are seven men walking a tightrope between life and death, determined to carve out a fragile, defiant space where imagination still breathes.

The film offers a gaze that is neither Orientalist nor melodramatic, and never panders to easy sympathy. Destruction is present in every frame, but the performers refuse to center it. Their movement—bold, precise, absurd—diminishes rubble without denying it.

There is no plea for tears, no romantic claim that “art survives.” Instead, ruin recedes to the background. Art takes its place in the foreground—unapologetic, untheorized.

These men aren’t creating art. They are inhabiting it, fully, urgently, as if performance itself were a way to stay alive.

In response to a journalist after the screening, Mai Saad said that her motive was to document daily life without interference—to let the camera follow the Gaza Free Circus freely as they practice life.

But what the film captured on the ground was far deeper than “daily life.”

It acts like a microscope, exposing not just habits but a raw, restless urgency—the artists’ near-delirious determination to reimagine the world, then rebuild it to match that vision. What we witness isn’t “daily life.” It’s a stubborn, creative defiance against annihilation.

One performer sent his wife and child to safety, choosing to stay behind. The fear of vanishing in a strike haunts him; the ache of distance wears him down. Yet, gathered with his circus companions late at night, rubble at their backs, he interrupts the grief: “Guys, give us a break from this sadness bit. Let’s live in reality.”

But his “reality” isn’t ours. It’s not the ruins we see—it’s the world they choose to make visible.

When the white paint goes on, the devastation shifts. Creation begins. This isn’t about entertaining children scarred by war. It’s about the deeper power of the artist: to conjure something out of nothing, and to believe, against all odds, that doing so still matters.

One performer had been living in Germany and was only visiting Gaza when the war broke out—trapped by chance, not choice. He makes no claims about uplifting children or resisting occupation. He’s bluntly waiting for a chance to leave—or to die.

And yet, there he is—spinning through the streets with uncontainable energy, making children laugh in a perfect Donald Duck voice.

He doesn’t ask why he performs. He just does. Because art, for him, isn’t a mission. It’s a reflex.

Each time the circus rides through Gaza’s south, Al-Danf’s camera follows with quiet steadiness, not as a commentator but a witness. The performers seem to register the ruins around them—but only in passing. Their true focus lies elsewhere.

Two Gazas unfold onscreen. One lies shattered by war. The other takes shape in the minds of artists who neither deny reality nor flee it, but envision something beyond it—measured, piece by piece, in imagination.

You see it in their ease with their surroundings. In the casual way they speak of recovering body parts. In the care taken to cook a meal, or rehearse a show, hours after catastrophe.

This isn’t a film about daily life. It’s about something rarer: the moment when a different reality begins to take form—first in the artist’s mind, then in the world they insist on remaking.

The dopamine of hope

“One More Show” doesn’t retread headlines or offer political shorthand. It avoids naming villains or drawing borders. Instead, it focuses on a deeper truth: artists caught inside a besieged world—and carrying that siege within themselves.

Through that quiet lens, the film reveals who resists and who destroys, without a single slogan.

Art here is not a substitute for life, or even for resistance. It’s how these performers live with dread—how fear of death becomes a fierce appetite to keep living.

And in creation, they glimpse what one calls “temporary dopamine”—a fleeting, electric high that may not last, but lasts long enough to go on.

At its core, creativity—before it’s shaped by markets or acclaim—is not self-indulgence. It’s a shared act, a lifeline between souls confronting the same abyss.

In “One More Show,” seven performers cling to art amid loss, rubble, and the smell of death. With exhausted bodies and undimmed vision, they try to dress the wound of the world—shaping it to match how they see, not how it is.

Unlike Handala, the Palestinian symbol of silent defiance, they don’t turn their backs. They reach outward, determined to shift reality—even by a meter, even for a minute.

This is a film about artists stripped of comfort, safety, and all conventional validation. It is about the high—call it the dopamine of hope—that lets them build something where there was nothing. Not to beautify survival, but to forge it. To create survival itself.

What is the world without art?

Amid shattered buildings and stories of scattered limbs, one scene cuts deepest: seven men lying on mattresses in the open air after a missile strike nearby. Before drifting into what could be a final sleep, they share a quiet, surreal wish—that if one of them dies, his body remains whole, to spare the paramedics the pain.

This isn’t morbid humor or indulgent poetry. It’s how artists see the world: with tenderness, even in death.

Then dawn breaks.

And once again, they perform—standing in the rubble as a grieving crowd watches. In those fleeting moments of performance, people find more than distraction. They glimpse a version of survival that holds meaning—not mere endurance, but survival shaped by vision, by art.

The film reminds us: artists don’t stop wars or dismantle systems. But they stop despair from winning. They give survival a shape, a face, a moment of dignity.

“One More Show” was born with no budget, no safety, no solid ground. It was made by two directors in different cities—Mai Saad in Cairo, who lit the spark, and Ahmed Al-Danf in Gaza, who carried the camera like one carries fate.

Their effort mirrors the circus’s own: to create despite fear, despite lack, despite everything.

In a world where art is buried beneath bureaucracy, funding demands, and paralyzing doubt, this film offers a quiet reminder: the most essential art comes from a place untouched by industry—from a depth beyond calculation.

It ends with a whisper, and perhaps a warning: What happens to the world when artists disappear? What remains if art is gone?