With Hasan in Gaza | Kamal Aljafari

In Conversation with Kamal Aljafari

The occupation of Palestinian lands by the settler Israeli state, and the systematic elimination and displacement of the Palestinian population, has a long history. However, never throughout this timeline of violence have these oppressive – and even genocidal – actions belonged so fully to the regime of the visible as they do today. A regime that has largely arisen from the accelerated circulation of images, where the inability to take direct action is compensated by representations of brutality – resulting paradoxically in the banalization of the suffering endured by the Palestinian people. In a time when the idea of producing images for the sake of urgency itself has become outdated and often inconsequential, when film festivals risk becoming image factories that reproduce violence, death, and short-lived, ready-to-consume feelings of empathy and awareness, what form of creative impulses should artists and filmmakers respond to?

As we are confronted with the omnipresence – and, for this very reason, also the invisibility – of images of the present, Kamal Aljafari, whose new film With Hasan in Gaza premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, seems once again to be addressing this question by directing our gaze toward the past in order to better see and make sense of the present. Unlike many recent Palestine-centred non-fiction films – often made by Western filmmakers, which take October 7 as the cornerstone of their narrative approach – Aljafari works within a much more complex and personal timeline, where lived memories are at once forgotten, retrieved, and pondered upon. This mnemonic gap between the moments when these images were filmed and when they resurface through the director’s reminiscence, as they are woven into a film shaped differently from the initial intentions, opens up a reflective space that reaches far beyond the functional, catharsis-oriented cinematic framework.

Following the world premiere of With Hasan in Gaza at Locarno, FILMEXPLORER sat down with Kamal Aljafari to discuss how he worked his way through these newly discovered personal documents, and to reflect on the current and future state of image-making under the irreversible consequences of a vastly mediatized and instrumentalized genocide.

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Öykü Sofuoglu (ÖS): When I read the description of the film on the website, which says "three MiniDV tapes of life in Gaza from 2001 were recently rediscovered", I initially thought these tapes belonged to someone else and that you had found them. It was only as I watched the film that I understood the images had actually been shot by you. I find this progressive shift from impersonal to personal quite interesting. Was it intentional? How would you describe your experience revisiting these tapes?

Kamal Aljafari (KA): I found these tapes exactly a year ago. I refer to it as a discovery because I truly didn’t know I had them. I realized very quickly that what I had was almost like a “found film,” which led me to not change the order of the shots and to keep them as they were. I would say that the sound, music, and written narration made up the main editorial work we did on the film. Somehow, sharing certain memories and sounds that this material evoked in me also rooted the film in the present.

ÖS: How does one come to forget images they once shot themselves?

KA: It’s a really good question. I think the reason I don’t remember them is because I hadn’t ever watched them in the first place. In a way, it’s a blessing to forget – you can’t carry every memory with you, otherwise you’d go crazy – but the simple fact is that I didn’t remember these tapes at all. I didn’t even remember filming until I saw myself in the images. Then, slowly, I realized that I had been there. It was also through the written timecodes on the tapes that I discovered when I had gone – the 1^st and 22^nd of November 2001.

ÖS: Working with archival material always involves an ethical dimension, since you’re using and manipulating images shot by another person, someone from whom you don’t – or can’t necessarily get permission to repurpose them. In the case of personal archives, I wonder if the instinct to change or alter them, perhaps even embellish them, might be even stronger, since you owe ethical responsibility to no one but yourself. How do you see the difference from this perspective?

KA: This footage felt as if it had been filmed by someone else because of the passing of time, which created a very interesting relationship with the images. With such a big distance, you can look at things differently – that’s why I liked the archival aspect of the project. I suppose if I had seen this material right after filming it – I had wanted to make a film but eventually I didn’t make it – I wouldn’t have liked the way it was shot, or I would have cut the parts where the camera wasn’t well positioned. Now that I’ve made other films, I’ve developed a certain taste for images and an understanding of their importance as documents, as testimony. So I ended up keeping everything as it was. For me, it wasn’t important how it was filmed; what mattered most was simply that it was filmed.

ÖS: I can’t help but draw a parallel between this experience you had – being dispossessed of your own memories – and Palestinians being dispossessed of their lands and their right to exist.

KA: Absolutely. There is somehow both a great mystery and a certain logic to these tapes surfacing a year ago rather than ten years ago. I can’t explain why. As I said in the discussion following the screening, it’s really a film that was making itself. I like this notion a lot – an object that was already there, making itself. That’s quite the opposite of how films are made today, because what does making films even mean nowadays? It means having a film industry, a script, a plan; applying for a funding, scheduling a shooting, scheduling any editing. What was the schedule of this film? It needed 24 years! I think that’s the aspect I find quite interesting and truthful to life itself.

ÖS: In relation to what you have just said, waiting was also part of your experience within the film. Especially during the scene where you were filming through the window.

KA: I’m realizing more and more that my first teacher, in that sense, who taught me how to film and have patience was Hasan, because all the time he was telling me to wait and keep the camera on. I was basically following his instructions. At some point, I started to think that nothing was happening, but the moment you wanted to stop, the action would start again. This is what was happening in this sequence and we also kept it as it was.

ÖS: There are also some scenes where Hasan was filming…

KA: Yes, he was filming me, and you can see the difference between our styles. He likes to zoom in! I really liked his camera work because it tries to show you the evidence directly with the zoom, whereas I was trying to be more contemplative.

ÖS: Something I noticed while watching your film was the way it, like many others from the region, reflected the effort Palestinians must make to show the extent of the destruction they endure. As if being attacked and murdered weren’t enough, they are compelled to prove It’s real, that it’s authentic. The instinct to address the camera – to say «Look how the Israelis shelled our house, look at the walls, at all the shrapnel that rained down» – adds another layer to their presence on camera.

KA: Palestinians have developed a relationship to the camera like no other nation – always insisting on showing you what is happening to them. It’s so painful to see that it was already present even back then. One of the women even says: «It’s all for nothing. What is this going to change?» And she’s right. 24 years ago, yet people were already questioning what the camera is useful for, because nobody helps them or does anything to change the situation. It’s a very tough realization to witness, especially today with the mass destruction and mass murder of people. It just continues – there’s no bottom.

ÖS: In times of mass destruction and genocide, we as viewers are also flooded with images of that destruction. The media becomes oversaturated with violence and murder, which can ultimately lead to indifference – there is a limit to what one can witness through images, and once that limit is reached, there’s a great risk of apathy that reduces everything to the same level. Do you think the return to archival material is, in some way, a symptomatic reaction – a way to grasp what is actually being destroyed?

KA: I think the genocide against the Palestinians is the genocide of image-making because whatever you film ends up being meaningless. You film people being starved and they allege that it’s AI – this what the majority of Israelis think! The real victims here are Palestinians but ultimately it will affect the humanity. It is just a matter of time. It’s very sad to see where it’s going because today it is the Palestinians and tomorrow will be another nation.
You know, filmmakers often use the metaphor of giving birth to a film. In the case of this one, it’s like giving birth to something already dead. It’s very strange, because at the same time, working on it somehow kept me alive and even hopeful – at least I was doing something – but sharing it with people is very painful, because everything is gone, and I know nothing about these people or what happened to them. They were children. They grew up in these conditions, and eventually, when they reached the age of 25 or 30, they were killed. The most painful thing is that this just goes on, despite all the human rights organizations writing reports – despite everything. Nothing has meaning. So it continues.

ÖS: As the film reaches its end, you open up a deeply personal space through written text in which you reflect on your imprisonment almost four decades ago. At what point did you decide to include this in the film? Was the idea there from the very beginning?

KA: Like in my other projects, there’s a point where I have to start thinking about the end credits – something I really don’t like in cinema. The film ends, and then you list all the names: the actors, the sponsors, the catering, the cafés where people had their coffees. Who cares about that? My idea was to share memories by adding another layer to the narration, one that almost makes you read the film differently or want to rewatch it. I’d say the idea came to me while working on this film, and it was all about remembering; watching the material made me recall certain things I hadn’t even thought about in years.

ÖS: The tapes you discovered belonged to a period when image production and circulation were relatively scarcer than they are today. Do you think that finding images from our present, 24 years in the future, would have the same emotional and evocative impact?

KA: It’s really hard to say, as there’s an overdose of images today, but I still think the personal – the autobiographical – is the most important aspect of image-making. So despite the fact that there are so many images, I believe that what you choose to share, what you feel is important to you, will always be the most essential element.