In rediscovered 2001 camcorder footage, acclaimed Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari goes in search of a man he once met when they were prisoners, in a heartfelt tribute to the lost of Gaza, and the life that persists.
With Hasan in Gaza brilliantly centres the need to bear witness as no less than a matter of life and death.
With Hasan in Gaza 2025
مع حسن في غزّة
Cinema — just like a hometown once lived in — is a territory of memory and return. Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari is known for a sensitive body of work which, blending documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques, makes poetry of political resistance, reclaiming and recontextualising historical images that have been looted from archives, or have uprooted his people from view and dehumanised them for the purposes of propaganda.
His latest work of retrieval With Hasan in Gaza takes the form of a highly personal quest — for a man the director once knew, and for a city and time that no longer exists. The footage has been salvaged from three mini-DV tapes shot in 2001, during the Second Intifada, when Aljafari went in search of an inmate he had been in prison with when he was eighteen. The significance of this encounter only gradually emerges, while we become immersed, travelling on a road trip from north to south with a guide, in Gaza as a perilous open-air jail, through hand-held footage that reminds us how long desolation has been a condition of the occupation.
– Carmen Gray