In a time of crisis in the Middle East and conflicts around the world, the film “How Kids Roll” – screened at the Vatican Film Library on Thursday – seeks to bring a message of hope and of a fraternity that, in the eyes of the young, is still possible.
By Beatrice Guarrera and Andrea Moneta
“We have dreams, we have hopes. We are more than rebels. We are more than mere targets.” This appeal, voiced in the film “How Kids Roll” by a young girl from the Gaza Strip, resounds today as both an affirmation of existence and a warning to adults.
The film, directed by Loris Lai, and nominated for the 2025 David di Donatello Award for Best Directorial Debut, carries a powerful message of responsibility and hope, launched by children themselves who, in their innocence and purity, refuse to become one another’s enemies. On the contrary, they seek possible futures for living, through friendship.
“How Kids Roll” (original Italian title: “I bambini di Gaza – Sulla onde della libertà”, “The Children of Gaza – Riding the Waves of Freedom”) is therefore an appeal to fraternity that emerges from the example of the two main characters: Mahmud, a Palestinian boy from Gaza; and Alon, an Israeli boy living in a settlement. Their bond extended beyond filming, as both actors testified during a screening of the film on Thursday at the Vatican Film Library.
Set in Gaza in 2003, during the second intifada, the story follows two boys united by their passion for surfing, which allows them to find common ground despite the climate of hatred and hardship in which they live.
Yet violence remains ever present: lives continue to be lost, and the spiral of hatred never stops. Life is punctuated by games constantly interrupted by sirens warning of incoming bombs. In this climate of hatred, it is the children who teach adults the value of life and the strength of hope.
The children’s perspective
The film centres on the children’s point of view. “Kids, precisely because of their age, represent the future,” Lai explained, “They represent what could still improve in the future. Between Palestine and Israel the situation has never been easy: now more than ever, it is a terrible situation.”
In this context, children are the ones who “reveal a third way.” “The Israeli boy in the film even asks his father a very simple question: ‘When will all this end?’ The father replies: ‘Perhaps when they are no longer here, or when we are no longer here.’ At that moment, the boy wonders why it is not possible to imagine a third option: coexistence.”
“The two boys manage, through sport – something pure – to break down barriers and reduce the divisions they are otherwise forced to live with,” Lai continued. “They show us the possibility of an alternative.”
The friendship portrayed in the film later became a reality, the director said. “At first, the two were a bit distant; they studied each other, observed one another, but were not open to the idea of friendship. After sharing the set and experiencing the extraordinary adventure of acting for the first time in a film, they managed to grow closer.”
For a world without hatred
“It was very difficult to pretend to hate him,” said young Mikhael Fridel, who plays “Alon.” He recalled a tense scene with “Mahmud,” played by Marwan Hamdam, “where I was being held by my hair and he had to throw a rock at me, and we had to pretend to hate each other, and fight, which is uncomfortable. We had to actually feel the emotions and live in the scene.”
Yet overall, the experience was entirely positive. “But if I had to choose one moment,” Fridel said, “it would probably be when we took the wave together in Cape Verde.”
Surfing was especially new for Marwan, who comes from a small Palestinian village near Haifa. “The acting was actually a little hard actually, but it was so fun,” the young actor said. “There is a scene that we’re fighting in the movie It was so hard because we had to bring a lot of emotions, a lot of anger, a lot of sadness. And the text was so long, and English is not my first language, so it was a little bit hard. But eventually we did it, and we’re so proud of what we did.”
He said, “The good moments, in this journey, is everything. It’s everything, everything, everything, everything. I liked everything, I liked the journey, I liked the bad moments too. I mean it happened, and I liked it.”
Asked about their dreams for the future, Marwan said. “Besides acting, of course, I’d like to be a pilot.” Mikhael, originally from Tel Aviv, lives in London with his family. “My dream,” he said, “Just everyone needs to be happy all the time, if that could happen” – a dream echoed by Marwan: “Hopefully. Hopefully.”
Starting again from love for life
At a time when Gaza is devastated – after nearly two years of war and almost completely razed by Israeli raids – the message of the film is more timely than ever.
“In war, everyone suffers,” noted Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, who introduced the screening at the Vatican Film Library. “Yes, perhaps in the end there is a winner, but what does it mean to be a winner? How can peace be won? How can one still hope for peace? How can one still love one another? By believing in a third possibility, beyond the false idea that the only alternative is either our death or theirs.”
Ruffini then recalled the words of a famous poem by Giuseppe Ungaretti: “In my silence I wrote letters full of love; I have never been so attached to life.” “This is where we must begin again,” the prefect maintained: “From love for life. We live in a confused and unhappy time. And it is unhappy precisely because it is unable to feel compassion, because it has lost the pure gaze of children.”
Hope necessarily involves recovering this gaze, Ruffini said. And then, “with this seed of hope,” praying, “each in accordance with their own faith, that the illusion of war may end and the spirit of peace return.”
The message of fraternity
“Fraternity is the foundation of humanity, and the message of Christ is based on this more than ever,” concluded Tarak Ben Ammar, one of the producers of the film, said in Italian. “With what is happening in the Middle East, but also in Ukraine, it is children who teach adults. Hence the desire to send not a political message, but a message of peace.”
Thus, the story of friendship that became real “is proof that cinema fosters brotherhood and sends messages of peace.”
In a time of repeatedly postponed ceasefires, of threats and reprisals, of massacres and despair, one is left to wonder when the world will finally listen to the cry of today’s children of Gaza. To borrow again the words of the young character “Alon” in the film, the most urgent question remains: When will all this end?
At the screening of “How Kids Roll” at the Vatican Film Library
