At a time when large parts of Gaza lie in ruins, a documentary from Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari offers a rare and intimate look at the region as it was nearly 25 years ago.
With Hasan In Gaza is pieced together from three forgotten MiniDV tapes that were shot by Aljafari in 2001 and were only recently rediscovered. The film receives its world premiere in the international competition of Locarno Film Festival, where the director was first selected in 2022 with short Paradiso, XXXI, 108.
“If I had discovered this material five years ago, it wouldn’t have made sense as a film,” Aljafari tells Screen. “But today it holds a completely different value, simply because the life we see in this film no longer exists.”
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Review: ‘With Hasan In Gaza’
The footage was shot in November 2001, when Aljafari travelled to Gaza in search of a former prison mate, who the director had met in 1989 as a teenager. Instead, he found himself on a road trip accompanied by Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown.
After that trip, the filmmaker returned to Cologne in Germany, where he studied film at the Academy of Media Arts, and never looked at the footage again.
It was only a year ago that he rediscovered the tapes, initially not recognising their content. “I was seeing shots from Gaza and didn’t realize what they were, until I saw myself in the footage,” he recalls. “That’s when the memories slowly started coming back. It was the first film I ever shot in Palestine and never made it”.
Born into a Palestinian family in the Israeli town of Ramla, Aljafari is now based in Germany.
Describing his latest film, he says: “It depicts life in an open-air prison, and highlights the harsh conditions people endure under occupation. It was already happening 24 years ago, and now Gaza is completely erased, with people experiencing genocide. That was my last visit to Gaza because it became impossible to go there afterward.”
He also lost track of everyone featured in the footage. “I have no idea what happened to all these people,” Aljafari says. “It’s been 24 years, and it’s impossible to trace anyone – especially in Gaza, where everything is destroyed and people have been displaced.”
Aljafari made debut feature documentary The Roof in 2006, which was focused on his family’s life under occupation. His second was 2009’s Port of Memory, which explored Jaffa’s ruins and the Palestinian community there, winning the Louis Marcorelles prize at Cinema du Reel.
With Hasan In Gaza marks a departure from his previous feature A Fidai Film, which was more experimental and won the Visions du Reel jury prize last year.
“The film wasn’t edited in the traditional sense,” says Aljafari of his latest film. “Its structure follows exactly what I found on the tapes, maintaining the same chronology in which it was shot. I had 150 minutes of footage and ended up using most of it. Only a few scenes were excluded.”
Produced by Kamal Aljafari Productions, the documentary received support from the Doha Film Institute, France’s Cnap – Image/movement, Switzerland’s Gwaertler Stiftung, France’s Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship (Canada/USA), and France’s Atelier 105.
The film has yet to secure a sales agent and sales are being handled directly by Flavia Mazzarino of Kamal Aljafari Productions. After Locarno, it will go on to play Toronto.
Aljafari’s next project is fiction feature Beirut 1931, which he hopes to film in Palestine next year. “We don’t know where exactly we are going to shoot it”, says the filmmaker. “The situation is very difficult right now and we have to decide how to manage it”.
Aljafari will produce the film through his own banner, and it has received grants from both the German Ministry of Culture and the Doha Film Institute.
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