With Hasan in Gaza - مع حسن في غزة
106 minutes | Palestine, Germany, France, Qatar | 2025
Three MiniDV tapes shot in 2001 are recovered two decades later, revealing a journey through Gaza that began as a search for a former prison mate and unfolded as a road trip with a local guide, Hasan, now lost to time and war. Streets, markets and shorelines appear with unguarded immediacy; gestures and voices return from a place that no longer exists in the same way. The footage is presented in the order it was found, allowing the images to ‘make’ the film and the archive to lead. An homage to people and places erased, a meditation on catastrophe and the poetry that resists, the film recognises the archive as both memory and evidence, asking what images can still do when the present is marked by devastation.
Rather than reconstructing events with commentary, the footage shows the passing textures of a day, conversations rising and falling, so that witnesses emerge from attention, not assertion. What begins as documentation becomes an ethical stance: to hold, to look again, to let life reappear where it seemed unseeable. The sense of a loss lingers, as if the material had waited for its moment to speak. By returning to what was recorded before, the film opens a present-tense encounter with absence, honouring those who may never be found and restoring to images the humane weight of time.
Kamal Aljafari
Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari is celebrated for his distinctive cinematic style. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and has held teaching positions at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. His installation “The Camera of the Dispossessed” was shown at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in 2023. Aljafari was also honoured at IndieLisboa 2024 with a full retrospective of his work at the Portuguese Cinematheque, as well as at the Spanish Cinematheque in Madrid in 2025. His feature 'A Fidai Film' (2024) was shown in over a hundred festivals and won 15 international awards. His most recent work, 'With Hasan in Gaza' (2025), premiered in the International Competition at Locarno Film Festival.