With Hasan in Gaza (2025)
Origin: Palestine, Germany, France, Qatar | Documentary | Director: Kamal Aljafari | 106 minutes
No More
About 'With Hasan in Gaza' by Erika Balsom (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/no-more)
'There is an image that won’t leave me. In early August, the Guardian published a series of aerial photographs of Gaza, taken from aboard a Jordanian military plane. The headline read, ‘A wasteland of rubble, dust and graves.’ In the first image, clusters of people are visible, appearing as tiny specks. Then, after the first few paragraphs, a mass of burnt blackness that can no longer be called a city fills my screen. Not a hint of green, not a sign of life. It is a picture of annihilation, a devastating confirmation of Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s recent statement – made after the approval of yet more settlements in the West Bank – that ‘the Palestinian state is being erased from the table not with slogans but with actions.’ The state – and its people, too.
This depopulated view from above was the scorched veil through which I encountered Kamal Aljafari’s new film With Hasan in Gaza, which premiered in competition at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The director calls the documentary a ‘homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and that came back to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence, or non-existence’. It is a new film that is in some sense an old film: comprised of footage from three recently rediscovered MiniDV videotapes that Aljafari shot during a November 2001 visit, with Hasan Elboubou accompanying him as guide. Aljafari’s previous feature, A Fidai Film (2024), was also an act of audiovisual restitution. He assembled and redeployed filmic materials that had been looted by the IDF from the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut in 1982 and which are now largely held in Israeli institutions. Dating from before and after the Nakba, the images chart a history of Palestine through the transformations of its landscapes. In With Hasan in Gaza, this archival impulse persists, but now Aljafari brings it to bear on his own images. The act of first-person witnessing converges with what Christa Blümlinger has called ‘second-hand cinema’ across an interval of nearly twenty-five years, in a time of genocide.
Over 106 minutes, Aljafari and Elboubou journey south down the Gaza Strip by car. Children play at the seaside, houses lie in ruin next to newly built settlements, old men play cards, and Israeli shelling pierces the night: they encounter all the ordinary beauty of life and all the ordinary violence of occupation. Aljafari’s intervention in this footage is light. Rather than treat his 2001 images as raw material to be reshaped, he is true to the order in which they were originally shot. These are documents of then, reframed but largely unadulterated. In this sense, With Hasan in Gaza has a loose affinity with the paradigm of the ‘perfect film’, named after a 1986 work in which experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs presented found news footage of the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X with virtually no alteration. As Jacobs put it,
A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state . . . the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, ‘editing’, the purposeful ‘pointing things out’ that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle.
With Hasan in Gaza is undoubtedly a different undertaking than Jacobs’s. Aljafari has a personal connection to these images, and he adds minimal narration in the form of text onscreen that bookends the film, as well as an intermittent yet decisive soundtrack that mixes an original score with popular songs from the region, whose lyrics form an affecting commentary. Yet he mostly leaves his footage alone, confident that the act of showing it to the world, now, is enough.
And it is enough. With Hasan in Gaza possesses a tremendous and at times unbearable force, given that the world it depicts has since been destroyed by Israel and its international supporters. The film exists across a chasm, torn between the moment in which the images were captured and the moment in which they are being presented, throwing into painful relief the relation to time and finitude at stake in all photographic images. ‘This is the university’, Hasan says; no more. Where are all the young people seen in the film now? Where is Hasan? The whole city of Khan Younis, where a long passage takes place, has been razed.
Against all these crimes of extermination, every second of this documentary is an archive of presence, demanding recognition and remembrance. Throughout, people young and old ask to be filmed. For some, particularly for the many children that smile and flash peace signs for the camera, the desire to be represented appears carefree. For others, the concern is to testify to harm. ‘We’re tired of speaking. My life? This is not a life. Look at this!’ says one woman, indicating the damage done to her home by Israeli attacks. Again and again, people point to their environment, directing the camera’s gaze. ‘This was a house’, one person says; now it is a field of rubble with an Israeli flag flying behind it in the distance. With Hasan in Gaza may show a world from before October 7, 2023, but, shot during the Second Intifada, it records how the occupation and blockade had already made Gaza unliveable. The camera, at times held by Aljafari and at others by Elboubou, points at people who point at their intolerable conditions. It witnesses their acts of witnessing, while also taking in so much else – markets, the azure sea, families, crowded streetcorners – in a refusal to reduce Palestinian life to suffering.
With Hasan in Gaza is a road movie of sorts: two men driving through a landscape, often filming out of the car window and encountering various people along the way. This genre is often associated with individuality and freedom, but here the car journey is at the heart of a double story of imprisonment and state violence. Early on, onscreen text reveals why Aljafari, a Palestinian born in Ramla, has come to Gaza: to find his friend, Abdel Rahim, with whom he was incarcerated in an Israeli juvenile prison in the Naqab Desert in 1989, after he was accused of belonging to an ‘enemy organisation’. One day Rahim punched a guard and Aljafari never saw him again. Much of the film unfurls without further reference to this, as though other concerns have eclipsed the original motivation for the trip. Road movies tend to wander. Near the end, though, Aljafari picks up the thread in a scrolling text that weaves his own experience of detention together with that of the people of Gaza, who exist, he writes, ‘in the largest prison in the world’. ‘I went to Gaza, searching for a friend without an address’, he explains, before ending with a statement at once intimate and expansive, framing his relation to his own past and the Palestinian experience more broadly: ‘I remember.’
What can an image do? Today, when photographs and videos of famine and slaughter speed across networks and yet have seemingly no impact in slowing, let alone halting, the violence against Palestinians, it can be easy to lose faith in the power of images. Already in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag acknowledged that ‘Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.’ A film will not stop a genocide. But images can be, as Aljafari affirms with this documentary, a form of memory addressed to the future. With Hasan in Gaza departs sharply from the repertoire of humanitarian journalism and its present-tense immediacy, offering a different relationship to duration, historicity and attention. As Dork Zabunyan has suggested, images of struggle are never exhausted in the moment of their production, for they are ‘also addressed to other individuals who might become the bearers of the torch of revolt at a later as yet unspecified date’. One can stare at the aerial photograph of Gaza, a distanced and dead picture. But one might better turn to the vital anachronism of With Hasan in Gaza and be reminded: history is long and Palestine must be free.'
For a live Q&A about “With Hasan in Gaza” by Kamal Aljafari, selected for the Concorso Internazionale section at the 78ᵗʰ edition of the Locarno Film Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSlujyyTpt8
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