We priv­i­leged West­ern­ers can opine and argue about issues like the Pales­tin­ian-Israeli con­flict, but our posi­tion is not unlike that of a bomb­ing pilot, a mile high and see­ing only a tiny map on an elec­tron­ic screen. From this far away, we can afford to have nuanced per­spec­tives, tak­ing cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences and ancient his­to­ry into consideration.

Opal-eyed urchins gazing up sadly out of apartment buildings turned into bloodied bomb craters is, we know, a trope designed to turn us into mush. But it’s also reality. Was Løkkeberg supposed to avoid the traumatized preteens?

In the prover­bial boots on the prover­bial ground, it’s anoth­er sto­ry, which is what good doc­u­men­taries like Vibeke Løkkeberg’s Tears of Gaza pro­vide. A por­trait of the civil­ian exis­tence in Gaza dur­ing the Israeli siege of 2008 – 2009 as lived by chil­dren, the film seethes with the moral author­i­ty of a kid ques­tion­ing the homi­ci­dal fol­ly of the adult world. Løkke­berg, a pop­u­lar Nor­we­gian artist and pub­lic fig­ure, couldn’t gain access to Gaza dur­ing the con­flict, and so she returned after the 22-day war to film the chil­dren who sur­vived and, cru­cial­ly, to col­lect cell-phone footage tak­en by civil­ians in the street.

As a result, there are things in Tears of Gaza you don’t want to see. Civil­ians con­verg­ing on a bombed house and pulling the crushed corpse of a tod­dler from the rub­ble. Streets lit­tered with phos­pho­rous-bomb-scorched body parts. Infants in the hos­pi­tal, bawl­ing beside their dead moth­ers. Pre­teen girls falling to their knees in tears, try­ing to tell Løkkeberg’s cam­era about what they’ve seen. Dead babies, scores of them, some with bul­let holes at the tops of their skulls, the sign of what an out­raged Pales­tin­ian calls ​“short-range killing.” That is, execution.

You real­ize how much Gaza is just like any oth­er medi­um-sized, low-rent mod­ern metrop­o­lis (“one of the world’s most pop­u­lat­ed areas,” the film notes), how famil­iar and ordi­nary it is. So when you see the bombs hit from the point of view of the man on the street, it’s jar­ring, as if your own neigh­bor­hood were being dev­as­tat­ed, and your own cell phone cap­tur­ing it. The unvar­nished imme­di­a­cy and access that mobile tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides seems to be the future of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing — and pos­si­bly the sal­va­tion of mod­ern soci­ety, a way for all of us to see first­hand the hav­oc and blood­let­ting our politi­cians create.

It’s been said too often that it’s impos­si­ble to be objec­tive about the Gaza War, but what’s more objec­tive than a man stand­ing in his own street, film­ing his neigh­bors being killed?

See­ing phos­pho­rous shrap­nel rain­ing down on an aver­age city block makes you won­der how the Israelis jus­ti­fy such malev­o­lence — and how fool­ish they are, to think that this muti­la­tion and hor­ror might paci­fy the Arab pop­u­la­tion rather than ignite a mil­lion oaths of vengeance.

Løkke­berg steers clear of the pol­i­tics of the Gaza War, cor­rect­ly see­ing them as beside the point. She doesn’t have to state how dis­pro­por­tion­ate the Israeli attack was — killing more than 1,200 civil­ians in response to hand­made Islam­ic Jihad fer­til­iz­er-fueled ​“rock­ets” and mor­tar shots that ran­dom­ly killed four Israelis in all of 2008.

Instead, she hones in on the chil­dren, three in par­tic­u­lar, and in this aspect Tears of Gaza is more of a tra­di­tion­al mod­ern doc, set­ting scenes up for the tykes, and squeez­ing our hearts as they crawl through the rub­ble and recount how their fam­i­lies were anni­hi­lat­ed in their liv­ing rooms. It’s manip­u­la­tive but also, iron­i­cal­ly, eth­i­cal. Opal-eyed urchins gaz­ing up sad­ly out of apart­ment build­ings turned into blood­ied bomb craters is, we know, a trope designed to turn us into mush. But it’s also real­i­ty. Was Løkke­berg sup­posed to avoid the trau­ma­tized preteens?

By avoid­ing pol­i­tics, Løkke­berg has made a most scald­ing film. You could argue that is because pol­i­tics as we know it in the media slip­stream is often lit­tle more than night and fog, bread and cir­cus­es — dis­trac­tions from the dead chil­dren. How else could the pow­er sys­tems of Israel or the Unit­ed States or any oth­er mil­i­tary-pri­or­i­tiz­ing state sus­tain them­selves? Minus the hazy scrim of pro­pa­gan­da and the unsight­ly spec­ta­cle of politi­cians fight­ing for their own careers, you see what’s real and what mat­ters. In its own way, Tears of Gaza loud­ly indicts the forms of mod­ern social dis­course, call­ing its self-inter­est­ed bluff with every glimpse of life­less baby and charred flesh. There isn’t much more that we can hope for from a sin­gle film.

Tears of Gaza opens in select U.S. the­aters Fri­day, Sep­tem­ber 21.