Retrospetiva de Kamal Aljafari

For around two and a half years we have borne witness to an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the result of a colonial project that for too long has been perpetrated in Palestinian lands, supported by Western imperial powers. In this context, the current retrospective dedicated to Kamal Aljafari takes as its starting point the screening of his most recent work, With Hasan in Gaza (2025). As the Director himself has stated, Aljafari’s latest film is also, at the same time, his first film. And what With Hasan in Gaza proposes is ever more urgent in a present marked by historical denialism and the attempted erasure of the Palestinian people.

Filmed during the Second Intifada, over two days (1 and 2 November) in 2001, With Hasan in Gaza emerges today from Mini DV cassettes that travelled with the director for more than 20 years, untouched and only recently rediscovered. With the passage of time, these cassettes have become an archive, this time a personal one. The film depicts a journey Aljafari took through Gaza, accompanied by Hasan Elboubou, who hosts and guides him and occasionally films too, as they search for Abdel Rahim, an old friend from a juvenile prison where the Israeli authorities detained the director for seven months in 1989 (First Intifada). Gaza, we know, no longer exists in the same terms we see in With Hasan in Gaza, and our meeting with these images now belongs more properly to the field of evocation. Or, as Erika Balsom writes, they are “an archive of presence, demanding recognition and remembrance”.

“I remember that in Jaffa, on the main street, there was a garden called ‘The Gazan’s Garden’ (…). I remember that, when I was a child, we would spend our weekends and holidays at my grandparents’ house in Jaffa (…). I remember being 17 years old when a schoolfriend asked me if I wanted to join a Palestinian group (…). I remember the police coming to arrest me late one night. (…) I remember the military tribunal in Lydda (…). I remember the prison cell. We were 40 prisoners, or more, from all corners of Palestine — many from Gaza. (…) I remember.” — recalls Aljafari. The move towards remembrance, then, is doubled. It remembers those whose whereabouts today are unknown; it remembers Hasan, Abdel and the children who ask to be filmed; it remembers the sea; it remembers the sunset over Gaza. And in turn it reminds us that the determining date was never 7 October 2023, that 25 years ago, and many more before that, life in Gaza was already unimaginable, intolerable.

The decision to remember, enacted in making visible that which has by all appearances been obliterated, eradicated by the fiction imposed by Zionism, is present throughout Kamal Aljafari’s cinematic work. It is an approach that often draws on the reclaiming or reappropriation of archives, as a means of resisting the onset of forgetfulness. And while the archive in With Hasan in Gaza belongs to the director himself, in films like Recollection (2015) Aljafari makes use of footage by others to achieve what he would later name “cinematic justice”. By digitally removing actors from the foreground of Israeli and North American films, it reveals what was there all along: Jaffa, Aljafari’s birth city, from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the Palestinians that lived there, including his own relatives. The coloniser’s cinema is deconstructed to make way for restitution. A Fidai Film (2024), in turn, recovers footage the Israeli army looted from the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Through filmic interventions in the footage and rigorous sound editing (in musical collaboration, as for With Hasan in Gaza, with Simon Fisher Turner — friend of Derek Jarman who collaborated with him on works like Blue and The Last of England, among others), the film turns on its head the notion of who is erased in the context of occupied territory.

As we question the role of images (and cinema) at a time when we are shown a genocide through footage filmed by its victims, and in a moment when Gaza is replaced by the next abysmal political happening, and the next, and the next, allegedly resolved by a fantasy ceasefire, Aljafari restates the impossibility of negating the Palestinian people, historically, materially or existentially. With each film he reminds us that Palestine and its people not only will not be erased, but they will, without fail, be free.