Having already declared his passion for working with archival footage in earlier films, Kamal Aljafari constructs audiovisual memory vessels – particularly vital at this moment, when a significant part of Palestinian heritage is under threat of erasure and its territory of cleansing.
In his most acclaimed feature, A Fidai Film, Aljafari revived the memory of the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut, which was raided by the Israeli army during the 1982 invasion and stripped of its entire archive.
Defined by the director as a “cinematic sabotage” and “a counter-narrative to this loss,” A Fidai Film seeks to recover and reassemble the stolen fragments of Palestinian history, unfolding as a moving meditation on identity, remembrance, and resilience through an inventive fusion of documentary and experimental cinema.
Aljafari’s latest documentary, With Hasan in Gaza, which recently premiered in the International Competition of the 78th Locarno Film Festival and will be presented at the Doha Film Festival in November, is conceived out of the same drive to resurrect places and people who are no longer present.
Yet this work adopts a more intimate, self-revealing tone.
When Aljafari stumbled across a box with forgotten MiniDV tapes, he did not immediately recognise what he was looking at. The images – grainy, intimate, raw – were his own, recorded in Gaza in 2001 and never replayed since.
“I never watched the tapes back then,” Aljafari admits.
“I filmed, took them with me while studying abroad, and somehow forgot about them. When I found them again, I couldn’t even remember having shot most of it. At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at until I suddenly saw myself on screen,” he tells The New Arab.
For him, revisiting this material was nothing short of miraculous. “It was like discovering life after death,” he reflects.
“Your mind and heart are caught between what you’re watching and what you know has since happened to this place. You keep questioning the destiny of these people, their fate.”
The now assembled footage acts as a time capsule of the enclave before the full tightening of its closure in the mid-2000s — faces of children, domestic interiors, quiet moments of hospitality – all scenes that today feel irretrievable.
“The only thing I remembered clearly was spending the night at Hassan’s home,” Aljafari recalls. “I slept in his children’s room. Watching those scenes with the kids today is still heartbreaking.”
But Hassan, like the others who appear in the film, has vanished from Aljafari’s life.
“I have no news of them. I only met Hassan once, on November 1, 2001. He worked as a fixer for foreign journalists. After that, I never saw him again. By 2004, Gaza had become almost impossible to access.”
The rediscovered footage revealed to the director not just personal memories but an enduring political reality.
“Even then, you could already see the conditions people were forced to live in. Looking at it now, 24 years later, you realise the extent of the injustice. Gaza has become a laboratory – first you shoot at them, then you put them under closure, and now, finally, you decide to kill them all. This is the final solution they are implementing.”
Editing memory
Despite its decades-long slumber, the material required little intervention.
“I had three tapes in total, and I used almost all of them,” Aljafari explains.
“I didn’t even change the order of the shots. It was already a documentation, a kind of travelogue. My work in the editing room was mostly about sound and adding textual narration. What you see is how I found it.”
At one moment in the film, Hassan reassures someone being filmed that the footage is for a “future documentary” and that they won’t be recognisable.
“That wasn’t my intention back then,” Aljafari clarifies. “I wasn’t making a film; it was more research for an idea. Hassan probably said that to calm the man. Ironically, it became true – just not in the way either of us imagined.”
Working on the film also opened the door to the filmmaker’s own buried memories.
“Watching the footage evoked my teenage years in prison,” Aljafari says quietly. Arrested at 17, he spent time in Israeli detention, an experience that remains central to his life.
“When I started writing about it for the film, I realised the personal becomes collective. Gaza is a prison, just like the prison I knew. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have shared this experience.”
Curiously, he chose not to narrate these recollections within the film itself but to reveal them at the very end, as written text.
“I wanted the images to speak first,” he explains. “Placing my prison memories in the end credits creates a reverse experience. You finish the film, then look back on it differently. The text becomes a film of its own.”
A prison that never ends
For Palestinians, imprisonment is both widespread and normalised.
“Of course, nobody accepts it,” Aljafari stresses, “but if you’re arrested for political reasons, society doesn’t view it as shameful. It’s part of life under occupation.”
The situation today, however, is far worse than when he was 17. “Back then, we could be visited by the Red Cross. That doesn’t exist anymore. Today, teenagers as young as 14 are in prison, some under administrative detention without charges or trial. And Gaza itself has become the largest open-air prison in the world.”
Yet what astonishes Aljafari most is the resilience of people there. “The strength of Gaza is exceptional. Even just continuing daily life – eating, finding food, trying to survive – is resistance. They invent ways to have hope. The alternative is death.”
Still, he warns that the current moment reveals something terrifying about the world order.
“Killing journalists, expelling doctors, calling everyone terrorists – it’s pure dehumanisation. What’s shocking is the impunity. Europe grew up saying ‘Never again,’ but now those words are empty. We are witnessing crimes committed openly, with no consequences.”
Sharing Gaza's image with the world
Given this bleakness, what can a film do?
“I don’t believe cinema changes reality,” Aljafari admits. “But it can touch people’s humanity, it can share Gaza’s image with the world. The fact that With Hasan in Gaza is being shown at more than 50 festivals this December gives me hope. It reminds me there are good people everywhere – individuals who care, even if governments don’t.”
Aljafari’s work is far from over. He is now preparing a new feature set in Jaffa, his hometown. Tentatively titled Beirut 1931 and backed by the Doha Film Institute and German partners, the project explores Palestinian life within Israel’s borders.
Shooting it, however, may prove difficult under current restrictions.
For now, With Hasan in Gaza stands as both memory and warning: a portrait of life already under siege two decades ago, and a mirror of the catastrophe unfolding today.
“It’s a film about what was erased,” Kamal Aljafari says. “But also about what refuses to be erased.”
Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films