The film
"Young Freud in Gaza" follows Ayed, a young Palestinian psychotherapist working at the Palestinian Authority's Clinic for Mental Health in Gaza during 2006–2008 — a period of relentless pressure: armed clashes between Hamas and Fatah, Israeli missile strikes, and the ever-present shadow of a surveillance blimp hovering overhead. Against this backdrop, Ayed moves between his clinic and home visits, offering therapy and medication to patients struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, and suicidal despair. He trains young mothers in breathing exercises to manage panic attacks, counsels injured militants in meditation, and leads children in group sessions where they draw pictures and talk about losing siblings.
The film is also an intimate portrait of a healer who is himself struggling — with doubt, with the limits of what one person can do, with the weight of a population's pain. "Gaza needs a million psychologists," Ayed says. It is one of the most quietly devastating lines in documentary cinema.
Filmed nearly two decades ago, "Young Freud in Gaza" feels more urgent than ever. The questions it raises — how do you support mental health under conditions of ongoing violence and occupation? What does therapy even mean when the trauma never stops? — are not historical. They are the daily reality of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank today.
Our speaker
Emad Al-Rozzi was born and raised up in a refugee camp in Gaza Strip. He is occupational therapist by profession and have master's degree in special needs education with focus on children’s activities outside school, and writing is doctorate about refugee children. He has extensive experience in developing and implementing intervention programs for the traumatised children in war situations. Now he works as assistant professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, he teaches and research about children in difficult life situations. Emad has for a long time worked with traumatized children and will talk about his work, but also his own experiences with the ongoing genocide.
Currently in the West Bank
In the West Bank, the situation has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. Military raids, settler violence, land confiscation, and the mass detention of Palestinians — including children — have created a mental health crisis that conventional clinical frameworks are ill-equipped to address. Children as young as twelve are detained, interrogated, and held in Israeli military custody. The psychological consequences — fear, shame, rage, withdrawal, loss of trust — ripple through families and communities for years.
This is precisely where Anar works. Based in Bethlehem, Anar provides community-based psychosocial support and therapy specifically for child detainees and their families — meeting children where they are, rebuilding a sense of safety and dignity, and helping communities develop their own capacity to heal. Their work and the film embody that psychosocial support, rooted in community and delivered with care, can itself be a form of resistance — a refusal to let occupation colonise the inner life.