[Six months after the war, life in Gaza has only grown worse.]

On Wednesday, the local Lama film production company kicked off Gaza's own film festival, drawing on the work of local documentary and movie makers. They held it amid the rubble of Gaza City's Shijaiyah district, an area that was heavily bombarded during last summer's war between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in the crammed enclave.

The film event involved the unfurling of a red carpet through areas yet to be rebuilt since the war, which claimed more than 2,200 Palestinian lives.

"We took that symbol and made it work for the our reality here in Gaza," one of the event's participants, Said Aburamadan, told the Israeli news site +972. "For us, red is first and foremost the color of so much blood that was spilled here this summer. The blood of women, men and children."

About 100,000 people remain homeless after Israel's blistering offensive against Gaza-based militants, who fired rockets into Israeli territory. As my colleague William Booth reported earlier this year, Gaza's misery has deepened in the months after the war, with pledges of aid and reconstruction not honored.

"The people of Shijaiyah still don't have homes until today, and this festival is a message to everyone to think of them as human beings," Khalil al-Mozayen, another festival organizer, told the Huffington Post. "I want the festival to send a message to the whole world that people of Gaza deserve life — that they love life and seek peace."

Aburamadan also said it was a warning to the feuding Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah, the secular institution that holds sway in the West Bank, that "the internal conflicts between them are also destroying our lives here in Gaza."

(Washington Post)