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“Inside Gaza,” a documentary about journalists from the news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, won the Best Documentary Film award at Montreal’s Cinemania Film Festival on Saturday.
Directed by Helene Lam Trong, the 72-minute film follows the daily lives of four AFP journalists reporting from Gaza, a territory largely closed off to international media. It combines footage shot by the team on the ground with interviews recorded after they left.
The film was co-produced by AFP’s documentary unit, Factstory, with the broadcasters Arte and RTBF, and relies almost entirely on AFP images, mostly filmed by the journalists who appear in it.
Lam Trong, who previously won the Albert Londres Prize, a leading French journalism award often compared to the Pulitzer, interviewed the team at length after they left Gaza in early 2024.
The film was screened at the Bayeux Prize for war reporters in October 2025.
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and armed men took more than 200 people hostage. Israel’s military response has left 73,000 people dead in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable.
As of October 2025, around 200 journalists had been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.
Adel Zaanoun, AFP’s Gaza bureau chief and one of the film’s four protagonists, accepted the award in Montreal. He dedicated it to all the journalists “killed in this crazy and dirty war in Gaza” and to those “who still work on the ground without food, without water, without internet, without anything.”
He called on people worldwide to “continue to support journalists not only in Gaza but everywhere for media freedom.”
The film has won multiple international awards and is eligible for Oscar contention.
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