Several interconnected vignettes make up “Chronicles From the Siege,” Abdallah Alkhatib’s harrowing, poignant, sometimes darkly hilarious dispatch from the frontlines of a violent blitz. The drama is shot with a documentarian’s eye and unfolds in the ruins of an unnamed city, but its setting is far from nebulous — not least because of the presence of a few Palestinian flags. The stories are drawn from various sources, including tales from Gaza in recent years, as well as Alkhatib’s own experiences under fire in the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians in Damascus during the Syrian Civil War, which the Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker previously turned into the documentary “Little Palestine.”

Shot in Algeria and Jordan, Alkhatib’s follow-up (and first dramatic feature) poses intriguing questions, through both its form and content, about the utility of cinema during genocide. Can it ever be truly useful? If “Chronicles From the Siege” is anything to go by, then at the very least, the camera has the ability to re-humanize a people constantly demeaned and murdered, by framing them outside the immediate confines of their suffering, and by giving them ordinary problems to work through, albeit under extraordinary pressures that distort their sense of routine.

The situation is already dire when the story begins. In the film’s opening images, a handheld video camera captures numerous displaced Arab characters — men and women, young and old — gathered in a dilapidated town square as they scramble for scant rations tossed from the back of a truck. Alkhatib and cinematographer Talal Khoury quickly break away from this diegetic handycam (with which the film’s lens shares several aesthetic qualities, imbuing it with a pressing realism) and offer cinéma vérité glimpses at several characters who will be pushed to their breaking point in the subsequent 90 minutes.

The runtime covers what appears to be several days, but it’s hard to be sure. Time seems to collapse in on itself when bombs keep dropping overhead, and the act of trying to visit a next-door neighbor becomes a matter of life or death as sniper fire rains down. Even the wall clocks visible throughout the film — glimpsed over the shoulders of characters who express the psychological fissures of this siege, or stumble across poetry about the various Nakbas — all seem to have their clock hands stuck at about 7:30, no matter the time of day. Even as time marches on for Palestine and its displaced diaspora, things stay the same.

This flattening of time also ensures that each section bleeds seamlessly into the next, as we meet a troubled and hungry former video-store owner, the endearing Arafat (Nadeem Rimawi), scavenging for food and medicine in a mostly silent scene that sets the stage for the film’s visual approach. It’s low-lit, dim, and visually noisy, as though a rudimentary digital camera had been dropped into a war zone and picked up by an everyday citizen. And yet, these introductory scenes remain searingly cinematic, given Alkhatib’s intense focus on his actors’ eyes, and the differing ways they navigate desperation. It isn’t long before the digital static comes to embody the psychological fog brought on by living on a knife’s edge.

Arafat’s story dovetails into that of a group of young friends — three men and a woman, played by Samer Bisharat, Ahmad Kontar, Ahmed Zitouni and Saja Kilani — who take up temporary refuge inside his boarded-up store while in search of firewood, leading to a more dialogue-heavy sequence that breaks with the moroseness one might expect from recent films on Palestine. Although the quartet’s aim is survival, they end up trading universally relatable jabs about porn and masturbation, while gazing upon the many tapes and posters adoring the store walls, until they face a unique ethical dilemma: whether to use the movies to fuel a fire for warmth. Sentiment and pragmatism collide, in a hopeless reflection from Alkhatib on whether films, including the one we’re watching, can ever have material impact on survival. 

In keeping with this theme of persistence, we next meet a meek, bespectacled man, Walid (Wassim Fedriche), who tries to trade an old refrigerator for a single cigarette puff from a cunning smuggler, Saleh (Idir Benaibouche), revealing an entire hustle culture born of hunger and despair. Although a shorter, snappier vignette, it’s one in which Alkhatib further implicates himself by playing an unsavory thief with whom you can’t help but empathize, even as he screws people over.

Throughout the film, a resistance network can be heard helping and warning each other over walkie-talkies, but when we finally meet one of its members — the fiery, gun-toting Fares (Emad Azmi) — we’re met not with a tale of action and resilience, but a surprising sex comedy about premature ejaculation. Lest this seem too raunchy for such a serious backdrop, it’s also layered with questions of transactional intimacy for the sake of sustenance, as his girlfriend Huda (Maria Zreik) sneaks her way past artillery shelling for a seeming dessert-for-sex scheme that ends up both intense and jaw-droppingly funny.

Despite its occasional levity, “Chronicles From the Siege” remains firmly grounded in surrounding dangers, as the thunderous sounds of dropping bombs frequently interrupt even the laugh-out-loud comedy. All of this culminates in a stunning sequence set in a rundown hospital, where the majority of the ensemble returns, and is forced into further moral dilemmas under the threat of oblivion, in a race-against-the-clock finale shot in enrapturing long takes. Learning about each character over the course of the film not only adds individual dimensions to each scenario (and thus, broadens the characters’ horizons beyond their victimhood), but it also deepens the overarching societal fabric.

This climactic collision is woven from several minor ethical tugs-of-war that rest on each character exhibiting both selfishness and altruism in various scenes, until their complicated humanity is placed under a harsh spotlight. The result is a particularly moving thematic conclusion nestled within the chaos: the innate understanding that each and every one of them, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, deserves to live.