My name is Roby Elmaliah and I'm 28 years old, a filmmaker and a musician born in Sderot. My parents and four brothers left Sderot 3 years ago to Ashdod. My father decided to sell the house he built 20 years ago after it was hit by a Kassam rocket. 6 months ago I left Sderot as well after a rocket fell in the apartment I use to rent , a few meters from the house where I was born. Today I live in a kibbutz near Sderot, I run the SDEROCK, a music club for teenagers. I grew up in that club as a teenager…

Most of my friends are from Sderot. The people here are extremely warm like one big family. The town was established in 1954 by immigrants mainly from North Africa – Morocco, Tunisia that the government put in transit camps and forgot about. Along the years the city has been abandoned by the government especially the education, work and culturally in general. It is still abandoned today. The state don't take care of the citizens, their security and don't invest any real effort in Sderot. We, the citizens created our own culture ourselves. We spend time in the shelters creating music. When I was a teenager there were many rock band, in every shelter there was a band and many of them became famous and successful. The project – Gaza-Sderot is important to me, because during the past 8 years the media reported only about the poverty and misery of Sderot and Gaza and by that immortalized it. Gaza-Sderot is about how the citizens including me would like to be presented – as heroes with wide and rich worlds. People who are not different from other person or city in the world. And like the people in Gaza deserve protection and care.