Almost Zero
One person's aftermath of the Palisades fire
Directed by Saam Gabbay
In Almost Zero, multidisciplinary artist Saam Gabbay crafts an immersive portrait of life in the aftermath of the Palisades fire. Through haunting imagery and restrained storytelling, the film blurs the boundaries between memory, loss, and resilience, finding poetry in what remains.
Known for his striking visuals and creative practice that blends photography, film, and music, Gabbay brings his full range to this deeply personal and raw exploration of destruction and renewal. As he puts it, “I thrive on alive, meaningful projects and the brilliant, human teams behind them.” This spirit resonates throughout the film - which is now taking the festival circuit by storm!
How did you balance documenting real loss with building an emotional narrative?
The question gives me a bit too much credit—it assumes more intentionality than I had. When I heard Rana’s voice note, I said “Oh shiiiiiit, I guess I’m making something with this” out loud to myself while driving. I’ve come to recognise that state: when I don’t know what the thing is yet, but I start listening and know that it’s futile to resist the pull.
There’s a kind of terrifying faith involved, made me feel like a creative first responder—I find a way to show up, listen, and improvise hour by hour. It’s not about building an arc. It’s more like being animated by something I don’t yet understand and discovering it as it unfolds, in real time.
It began with Rana’s voice.
I brought in my friend Stephanie Linehan to play violin directly around Rana’s words, her staccato urgency and her thoughtful pauses. The next day, I was in a helicopter over the burn zone. The project took shape moment by moment, shot by shot. Finding routes past the daily roadblocks. The emotional arc wasn’t something I constructed - it was under the ashes just waiting for someone to hear the call.
Many did, and this was my particular frame.
How did you choose and frame the landscapes to reflect Rana’s inner world?
What I love about your question is that it illustrates what it means to be human— to project narrative onto everything. I know that many directors come at things with a vision but maybe observational documentary directors are people who simply lean towards a possibility.
I use my body as a divining rod. If I feel a sensation—tightness in my chest, heat in my fingertips— a rising sensation on the back of my neck, that’s how I know to move toward something.
It’s a very physical, spiritually athletic process. And when I say that some of the burned-out landscapes were hauntingly beautiful, I’m lucky that artists get to say weird things like that without undermining the immeasurable loss at hand.
The way the camera moved, the helicopter speed, how the land revealed itself through smoke and fog—that was the somatic logic. Then it all got edited to the specific, unusual cadence of Rana’s speech, and held by the violin score. It eventually became one complete organism. But none of it was though out- I had to wait for it, uncover it.
What was your process in crafting the soundscape, and how closely did it evolve with the narration?
Rana’s tone, a mix of revelation, introspection, curiosity, trust, and surrender, ignited the whole thing.
I called Stephanie Linehan, the violinist, who knows how I work. I don’t read or write music. I ask her to mimic a line I play on the synth with direction like, “Play that as if you’re pulling wood from quicksand,” or “hesitate there, like you’re about to fall down the stairs,” or “Hit the last note like it’s trying to escape.”
One of my favourite moments is where Rana got excited about these burnt book pages flying through the sky, and her cadence quickened and became fragmented. An idea came to me to have Stephanie drop the bow onto the strings to create jagged, falling chords.
I realised the score was becoming a way for me to finally feel what I was too numb to feel directly. It let me access the grief I carry from my own story—my family’s loss of country from the Iranian Revolution. I poured that into the music. It matched what my friends were going through now, in their fire.
What I did intentionally was for the final mix to feel like a song vs a documentary. In a documentary, the music is ducked behind the voice. But in a song, the music and voice are one.
“I realised the score was becoming a way for me to finally feel what I was too numb to feel directly. It let me access the grief I carry from my own story.””
How did you approach editing to reflect the anxiety and fragmentation after the fire?
Editing was hard. I can get biased by the emotional context of making an image, so I need an outside perspective. I asked Arash Ayrom (who’s cut for David Lynch), and he did a great edit and especially helped shape the beginning.
I then kept building the edit around footage I had shot of LA over the years (all of the footage is mine) while I was fine-tuning the score, jumping back and forth between Logic Pro and Davinci Resolve.
There’s a part where she imagines me driving down the coast and how I would be taking my time capturing images, stopping to see her corner. It’s quiet and meditative. Her wish for me in that moment was so beautiful—and so surprising—that I wanted the edit to fully entrain to it. That’s how we built it: her voice first, music as the envelope, edit as the container.
How did working across so many creative disciplines shape the way you told this story?
I feel for all of us who are told that these are distinct creative disciplines. I find those lines to be artificial. The brain just uses whatever it feels is an extension of itself. I’m glad to see the younger generation mostly free of thinking in hyper-compartmentalised ways.
I don’t feel like the director. I’m the one being directed. I was numb and exhausted. I woke up with ash on my phone inside the house. And somehow at dawn, I found myself crawling into a helicopter after the first rain with three cameras around my neck. It didn’t feel like a smart strategy. It felt like surrender.
Then I’m alone for days, bouncing between Logic Pro and DaVinci Resolve, obsessing over five seconds of dialogue, trying to do it justice. No sleep. Just need to get it right. And yet I’m grateful. These tools let me make something intimate. Handmade.
It’s a gift when your client isn’t a brand, but a person. Or a feeling. Or a whisper.
What's next for you?
Just that mild, persistent agitation as I wait for the next whisper.
Director @saamgabbay
Violin @queenie_losangeles
Rana Wilson: Accountant & Spiritual Practitioner @consciousmoneyguide
Mixer: @AndyBaldwin77
(Voice note and main fire victim in white hazmat suit) @consciousmoneyguide
Edit: Arash Ayrom @ArashAyrom, @saamgabbay
Color grading: @colorist_mk, @saamgabbay
Mix: @AndyBaldwin77
Master engineer: @magicgardenmastering
The man in the blue robe: Kayvan Taheri @kt602
The woman in Malibu with her blue sweater in the stills: Hayley McCune @hazelarries