Tucked away in California’s desolate desert, Bombay Beach holds the curious distinction of being the lowest inhabited place in the United States — 68 metres below sea level. 

Once a glamorous lakeside resort that drew celebrities like Frank Sinatra, it fell into decline by the 1970s, a victim of environmental decay and industrial neglect, like many forgotten American towns.

In recent years, however, Bombay Beach has found new life as a haven for outsider artists. Since 2018, this post-apocalyptic landscape has become home to a loose-knit creative community drawn to its haunting beauty and creative freedom.

Among them is Behn Samareh, who began working on a memorial in 2024 to honour the children killed in Gaza. His project became the subject of TRT World’s documentary Echoes of Innocence, which premiered on April 13 — fittingly, at Bombay Beach itself.

From ruin to renegade art hub

The location is no coincidence. Bombay Beach now hosts a biennale, described on its official website, as “a renegade celebration of art, music, and philosophy that takes place on the literal edge of western civilisation — the shores of the Salton Sea”. 

In addition to the biennale, there are smaller events throughout the year, and a ‘permanent collection’ by the lakeside: sculptures fashioned from discarded material, including, in true American style, old cars. 

It is in this setting that Echoes of Innocence was screened, open-air cinema under a fading sky, among the rusting remnants of a past America and the resilient community that now calls Bombay Beach home.

Screening a film in the place where it was shot adds resonance, and so it was here. Local pastor Jack Parker introduced the film as Samareh’s labour of love, his personal attempt to make sense of a senseless loss.  

In his American way, he introduced the film as one man’s odyssey to find his voice in a time of complete horror, but this was promptly followed by a conversation on how any response to Gaza must begin by putting its children first.

Cinematographer Kursat Uresin described Bombay Beach as “a perfect place for this memorial. It looks like the end of the world, like something out of Mad Max, like Armageddon”. 

He says, “While I was filming it, I felt the images had double meanings. As the Gaza genocide unfolds, it makes us feel like the world we once knew has ended.” 

His stark, lyrical shots of the desolate landscape mirror the devastation that runs through the film. This emotional depth also drew producer Aslihan Eker Cakmak to the project.

A seasoned filmmaker with experience on Palestinian stories, she recalls her reaction when she first encountered Samareh’s work: “I was struck. I called (film director) Ensar Altay immediately and said, ‘We need to make this film’.”

The documentary opens with a haunting shot of Bombay Beach at dusk, its strange characters, a masked figure glimpsed through layered fabric. It sets the tone, Bombay Beach as a theatre, where almost everything feels like performance. 

Then, with daylight, the film shifts focus to Samareh’s monumental work: thousands of holes dug into the earth, each one representing a child murdered in Gaza.

A memorial etched in grief and dust

For Samareh, Bombay Beach offers “freedom and space to do art”, a phrase that reflects America’s mythos of opportunity, though not without irony. The very idea of that freedom, he suggests, is often built at the expense of others. 

What gives Samareh’s work its power is how deeply personal it has become. The tragedy in Gaza has pierced through his identity as an American artist and touched something profound in him. 

A former graphic designer turned showbiz creative, Samareh once worked on massive productions, including Coachella – the countercultural festival that became a symbol of the mainstream. But where Coachella went corporate, Bombay Beach remains defiantly fringe.

Here, Samareh found the space not just to mourn but to reconnect — to write a book for his daughter, to bridge his own story with the grief of parents in Gaza.

Drawing on his experience in construction design, he built a machine — something like a lawnmower, but fitted with a giant screw — to dig the holes. He uses it every day, despite a debilitating back injury. “How can the world not see?” he asks the camera, tears streaming behind dark sunglasses.

His pain is not metaphorical. In the film, we see a doctor advising rest, warning that only time will heal his spine. But Samareh refuses. His grief is physical, carved into his very body.

Director Altay’s film captures both the bleak grandeur of Bombay Beach and something of the old American frontier spirit. 

Now and then we see Samareh go down on his knees and contemplate the setting sun, looking like he’s praying to a God that is listening. 

There is something very religious about him indeed. He says he has named his daughter Faith - Iman in Arabic - and it seems to be faith in the human spirit he wants to pass down as his legacy. 

Yet he is under no illusions. “The holes will disappear, like these children from the news,” he says.

Speaking to reporters, Samareh continues his American line, saying he is “perplexed” as to how so many children can be killed with no reckoning, but his discourse never seeks out why the genocide is happening or who is helping it. 

“This is not about Israel or Palestine but dead children,” he says.

This impulse — to decontextualise in order to empathise — is distinctly American. For many, it may be the only way they can look at Gaza. But that de-politicisation also risks erasing the very causes of the violence.

Still, after the screening, many in the audience remarked: “This film represents our community well.” In that sense, Echoes of Innocence becomes a kind of coda to old Westerns, a story of communities heading west, seeking meaning, and finding it in reinvention.

But this time, reinvention must come with reckoning: with the place they have settled, and the connections between this dead beach that is a product of American expansionism, and the beaches of Gaza that have been turned into real graves for children as a result of the same colonial mindset. 

Samareh’s memorial and the community’s embrace of it signal something new: a fragile but growing awareness, a readiness to confront history and grief without looking away. It’s not a solution, but it is a beginning.