‘How Kids Roll’: The film about Gaza’s children praised by Pope Francis

According to reports cited by UNICEF, the UN children’s charity, some 50,000 children have been killed or injured in the Gaza Strip since the outbreak of war there in 2023.

Those who have survived continue to face almost daily bombings, and in May of this year alone more than 5,000 were diagnosed with acute malnutrition.

The stories of Gaza’s children are at the centre of Italian-American director Loris Lai’s new film How Kids Roll.

Loosely based on the novel I bambini di Gaza (‘The Children of Gaza’), the film is set not during the current conflict, but in 2003, during the Second Intifada. It tells the story of two children – one Israeli, one Palestinian – brought together by a mutual love of surfing.

Among the film’s admirers was the late Pope Francis, who watched the film in the Vatican shortly after its release. The film, he wrote, “with its hopeful voices of Palestinian and Israeli children”, would be “a great contribution to the formation of fraternity, social friendship, and peace”.