By Libertad Gills
After nearly two years of a genocide against the people of Palestine, the film With Hasan in Gaza offers an unexpected beacon of hope. It is not because of what happens in the film but rather because the film exists that the film is hopeful. Let me explain.
Those who have admired Kamal Aljafari’s work for some time will recognize that this is once again a film made with archives. What is surprising, however, is that this time the archives are not material filmed by another. For the first time, Aljafari is working with material that he filmed himself. But so much time has passed since the footage was shot until now –twenty years to be precise– that the material has now acquired the status of an archive. It was shot on an early digital video camera, the quality of which would be extremely different today. The way of shooting is reminiscent of those days: a camera where the person filming is constantly looking through the viewfinder, looking and filming at the same time. The camera wanders with the videographer, attached to his eye (Aljafari’s eye and Hasan’s eye too), capturing their way of walking or moving through a space and taking it in at the same time. These long hand-held shots would be cut out in most films today, but in With Hasan in Gaza they are part of the spectator’s pact with the film. We must gain the right to enter Gaza, the right to see these images. We must go on the journey with Aljafari.
The film was shot entirely in one day, on three tapes, during Aljafari’s visit to Gaza between November 1st and November 2nd in 2001. As the film progresses, we slowly learn that Aljafari is searching for someone he met in prison when he was unjustly arrested as a teenager in Palestine*. Hasan is a man he meets who helps him on his search. In the process, Aljafari learns from Hasan’s way of looking and filming. “Wait. Be patient”, Hasan tells him repeatedly throughout the film. This film is a testament of that patience, learned and practiced over decades. In a moment where journalists have been banned in Gaza by the Israeli military and just showing images from Gaza is treated as an offense to Israel, being able to “visit” Gaza –even if only through a film– is enough of a reason to see With Hasan in Gaza. The footage is filmed in a way which reflects, perhaps, something very similar to how we might experience being there ourselves with a film camera: a wandering gaze, an unknowing of exactly where to look or from where sounds are coming, an underriding tension at all times, walking on the ruins of houses bombed by Israel, screaming mothers desperate to tell the world that this is not life, and the overwhelming amount of children smiling amidst the rubble, asking repeatedly to “film me”.
As a director who has spent the last ten years of his career working solely with archival materials, Aljafari has become a master in sound which he uses to open up archives and bring them to life in new ways. In With Hasan in Gaza, this was no longer necessary, as Aljafari works with the material just as it is. He neither changes the order of the images nor adds sounds for a particular effect. The material that we see is precisely in the order that the three tapes were filmed that day. What is added to the material that was not there before is the music. For this, Aljafari worked with music composers Attila Faravelli and Simon Fisher Turner, the latter a close collaborator of Derek Jarman, responsible for the soundtracks of Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1988), The Garden (1990), and Jarman’s final film Blue (1993). “It was difficult, if not impossible, to not be sentimental”, said Fisher during the film’s Q+A. Instead of sentimentality, the music emphasizes a sense of vertigo that the journey, and perhaps the film too, delivers. A sort of endless fall without the satisfaction of a final crash, similar to the Shepard tone that is used in films like Lucrecia Martel’s Zama.
One of the most beautiful sequences in the film is a drive at sunset through Rafah with the track “I Love You” by the Palestinian 1970s-1980s band The Silverstones playing on the soundtrack. The fact that the Silverstones only made one LP and Aljafari found it pretty much sums up the entire film and how fortuitous it is. Three MiniDV tapes shot twenty years ago by Aljafari, when he was a young filmmaker discovering filmmaking from behind the camera. Three tapes shot on a single day, twenty years ago, discovered just last year. Barely edited/touched, this film was practically already finished. “I wish this was always the case”, says Aljafari, who has made four other feature films and several shorts. Another lucky moment: when he is filming people in Gaza, some of them do not want to appear on the camera, so Aljafari and Hasan tell them not to worry, that this is for a film that won’t be made until many many years from now. “Do not worry. You will be unrecognizable by then”, they say, to assure them. But then Aljafari forgot about this film and did nothing with it. How did he know he would indeed make a film with it many years later? It’s as if the film from twenty years ago wants to say something now. It’s as if the film knew, if that’s a thing, that it would be made many years later. As we watch today, at its premiere in a packed cinema at the Locarno Film Festival, it’s as if this film was made for us to see it today.
What happened to Hasan, who Aljafari met that day and never saw again? What happened to all the children that we see in the film? What happened to Abdel Rahim, the man who Aljafari is looking for in the film? What happened to The Silverstones (the band) that they never made another LP? Where are they now? These are the questions that linger as we watch, the feeling of impermanence is in every shot. The feeling that what we are seeing is certainly very different today, “unrecognizable” even, or more likely, no longer there.
We keep looking. This is what the film does, this is what we must do today. It is dangerous to look, but to not look is far more dangerous. We cannot afford not to. We look at these images in the way that we look at the sky at night. Gaza is different today, we know: many of those buildings are not there, many children just like the ones that smile back to us in the film have been murdered, and not a single person has been held accountable. We have failed these children in our silence, it’s true. But we must keep looking, especially when a film appears out of nowhere like this one does, rediscovered after many years. A film that could have very easily disappeared, as so many digital videos do with time, and as is the fate of so many films, but which for whatever reason survived. Run now to see it, wherever you can.
* According to the Defense for Children International Palestine, each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system.
Concorso internazionale
With Hasan in Gaza
Director: Kamal Aljafari
Screenplay, Cinematography, editing, Sound: Kamal Aljafari
Music: Simon Fisher Turner, Attila Faravelli
Post-production: Yannig Willmann
Palestine, Germany, France, Qatar, 2025, 106′