Directed by: Kamal Aljafari
Distributed by: TBA
Written by Eric Zhu
80/100
In 2024’s “A Fidai Film,” archival experimentalist Kamal Aljafari repurposed images that the Israeli government looted from the Palestinian Research Center in Lebanon. Something that Aljafari’s project highlighted, with striking use of a neon red marker, is the haunting power of the footage that remains. This material is coded with loss and vulnerability towards Israeli offense, whether that be a literal attack, such as the looting, or a digital one in the form of propaganda/ethnographic reframing.
The simultaneously lamenting and defiant power of the Palestinian archives drives Aljafari’s mostly unmanipulated new feature, “With Hasan in Gaza.” Here, Aljafari turns to his own archives, re-presenting three rediscovered miniDV tapes he recorded in 2001. In these tapes, Aljafari meanders down the Gaza strip with his guide, Hasan, to investigate the disappearance of a boy he met in juvenile prison a decade prior. Without an address, their search becomes a probing travelogue, a capsule of sights, sounds, and people in Gaza during the second intifada.
A relatively quotidian image of life in Gaza, shown through a boisterous journey down a local market, is quickly shattered. During a seaside excursion, a father describes wanting to bring his children to the beach to make up for the care they lost during his 8 year imprisonment. Later, a group of women describe their decimated homes and their neighborhood’s uprooted trees. Collectively, we understand that absence has long been a structuring force in Palestinian life. As Aljafari occasionally wanders through the wreckage of people’s lives, it’s the fragility of the opening’s illusive stability that haunts. As family homes are shelled by tanks in the middle of the night, we recognize that this is a world where being filmed might result in losing the right to work, a camera mistaken for a weapon could get you shot, and getting into a fight in jail may result in disappearance.
The precarity observed in Gaza reverberates within the textures of the miniDV imagery, which gestures towards a city that doesn’t exist anymore. Largely withholding details of Hasan and Kamal’s expedition until the end credits, the pair’s meandering interactions are informed by a nebulous sense of loss, which is then reflected in the pixelated digital blur. All of these factors confer a ghostly force onto “With Hasan in Gaza’s” insistently mundane content (when a woman asks to stage a shot of the shrapnel flying into her house at night, the filmmakers pointedly tell her to leave everything be). Ambient sequences, such as an obscured ten-minute shot where the camera stares out a window at a standoff between an Israeli tank and Palestinian mortars, accrue materiality the longer they continue, almost as if the film is grasping for a half-forgotten memory.
The latent yearning of these images, and our understanding of Israel’s genocidal campaign, accent the delicate poetry that comprises a majority of “With Hasan in Gaza’s” runtime. In the continuous stream of daily interactions, we witness the hazy sunsets set to pop music, middle-aged men playing cards, steaming flatbreads cooking on the street corner, and children playing in the ocean. It’s the children Hasan and Kamal encounter who form the real heart of the film. Across the Gaza strip, the smiling kids ask to be photographed. Playing on the street, or posing with their reunited families, these fleeting snapshots of hard-won joy are informed by the absence of Kamal’s missing friend. This “original” brief, but impactful encounter with a human suffering an unknown fate compounds with each of Kamal and Hasan’s encounters, rendering the most commonplace, but recognizably authentic, exchanges both precious and heartrending.
The unavoidable question that hovers over “With Hasan in Gaza” is why this footage, at this moment. While Aljafari’s original intentions, which also depended on releasing the film long after its shooting, never materialized, this iteration nevertheless divorces these tapes from their spontaneous, present-tense shooting methods. The intervening years grant “With Hasan in Gaza” ample historical interest, showing us what life was like in Palestine during another historical flashpoint, but the choice to return to the archive is also a deliberate counterpoint to the totalizing images of despair that populate our contemporary representation of the region.
A compelling theory emerges from Aljafari’s present-day reminiscences. Late in the film, we’re informed by onscreen text that during Aljafari’s imprisonment, he lost the ability to imagine, and images outside of his immediate surroundings disappeared. As he describes it, “life became the prison.” For Aljafari, these tapes now carry the memories of his time in prison, which begin to intrude on the film in the form of onscreen text and a non-diegetic drone. For us, unbound from the burden of direct representation, these images invite speculation of who these people are, of who they might be now, of lives before these images, and of Palestine’s future. Through the dual acts of consecration and imagination, “With Hasan in Gaza” forces us to reckon with Palestine as an entity that exists beyond its occupational struggle.
“With Hasan in Gaza” Clip
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