Business Insider has recently completed production on “Dear Nizar, Dear Maryam.”
The project is a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning video about Hamada Shaqoura’s transition from food blogger to wartime chef.
This is Business Insider’s first feature-length documentary. It will be released on the 2026-2027 international film festival circuit.
Film synopsis
Before the war, Hamada Shaqoura was a food blogger in Gaza. He filmed restaurants, markets, meals, and everyday life as he built a future with his wife, Lamees, in Gaza City. Then the war began, and everything changed.
Told by Hamada as a love letter to his two young children, Nizar and Maryam, the film chronicles one family’s experience of more than 1,000 days of war in Gaza.
Nizar is born into displacement. Maryam is born as famine deepens. Hamada and Lamees try to shield their children from a reality no child should inherit.
Through intimate family videos, mobile-phone footage, social media posts, and voice notes, the film traces Hamada’s transformation from food blogger to wartime cook. It follows him into the depths of his own hunger and his fear that he will not be able to keep his family alive.
The film moves between the Gaza Hamada remembers and the Gaza into which his children are born. It is a father’s attempt to preserve small memories for them — a record of endurance.
This is a film about parenthood in a war zone, what happens to ordinary life when survival takes over, and the responsibility of leaving testimony for children too young to understand what they have lived through.
Director’s statement
“I am a Palestinian journalist and filmmaker based in London. For the past two and a half years, I have watched the war in Gaza from afar, like many Palestinians, with grief, helplessness, and a need to do something useful with that pain.
This film grew out of that need. I wanted to bring forward a voice from Gaza that audiences could recognize. Hamada Shaqoura was a food blogger before the war — newly married, ambitious, funny, creative, and building a life around food and social media. Then war transformed everything.
We started by making a short film about Hamada’s transition from food blogger to wartime chef. In 2025, we published “The Man Who Feeds Gaza’s Children,” which won the National Emmy Award for an Outstanding Light Feature — Long Form. But we continued to film his life through ceasefire, destruction, and famine.
The film became a love letter from Hamada to his children, Nizar and Maryam. It is a record of the Gaza that existed before the war, and of what their family endured to keep them alive.
Hamada’s voice and language are the heart of the film. Arabic is the language of his home, his children, his fear and his love, and I wanted the film to carry that intimacy without losing it in translation.
As a mother, I kept asking: how do you protect your children in a war zone? This film answers that question through one family’s daily life, love, fear, and resilience.”
— Reem Makhoul, July 2026
For more information:
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