This knotty and captivating work is impossible to detach from our present moment.
Every frame supplies an insistent echo to the ongoing assault on Gaza. Such an effect is a matter of design. In With Hasan in Gaza (2025), filmmaker Kamal Aljafari discovers and reconstitutes three MiniDV tapes from a November 2001 two-day road trip, more than a year into the Second Intifada, which brings into blunt exposure the current state of “Palestinian existence, or non-existence,” as he puts it.
This calibration of historical footage not only invites the viewer to draw parallels between what has been destroyed, then and now — absorbing the texture of roads, cafes, beaches and people along the Strip — but to experience the continuous logic of conflict and siege that has defined relations between Israel and Palestine since the former was established in 1948.
The original impulse for Aljafari’s journey isn’t immediately revealed to us. We watch from his perspective as he records through the window of a travelling car, conversing with Hasan, his open and forthcoming chaperone whose own story is left mostly unspoken. After untethered scenes of city life, a line of imposed text announces that Aljafari was searching for a fellow inmate from his time in prison, a man he knew when he was 17.
This retrospective narration is exclusively written, and diaristic reflections interrupt the screen only occasionally, refocusing the purpose of the initial trip and memories of detention. (Pointedly, he recalls Red Cross volunteers handing out copies of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth [1961] during his incarceration.) These moments usefully contextualise Aljafari’s personal narrative amid the overwhelming resonance of his handheld imagery. Simon Fisher Turner and Attila Faravelli’s score, interspersed with popular Middle Eastern songs, provides an infrequent reframing of past events, a kind of afterimage in audio.
Otherwise, what we experience is mostly verité and diegetic, taking in sights and sounds from the north of the country to the southern tip: taxis horns navigate the bustle of traffic; a street market seller gives the hard sell for his corn and eggplant; groups of unemployed men smoke cigarettes and play cards, stretched out on lurid blue plastic chairs, with one member jesting: “Film my bald head and make it look good.” The most affecting sequences feature ribbons of children, whether playing in the sea or delving through rubble, surrounding Aljafari’s unusual presence. Some are unabashed in their interest in what the camera is and what it does, pleading to be photographed while asking the important questions: “Are you filming us for real?”
Many of the adults depicted are also aware of the power of visual documentation and mediation. In the wake of an acute shelling attack in a populated alleyway, residents implore Aljafari to capture the residue of shrapnel and debris, providing forms of evidence that function as claims to existence. Women in the community demonstrate most vividly the sense of anger and injustice at their displacement. Elsewhere, men are shown lounging on the pavements at nighttime, semi-normalised to violence, desensitised to the thuds of mortar and gunfire in the nebulous distance. Speakers explain away instances of public quiet as the obvious consequence of funerals and periods of mourning.
What Aljafari has managed to achieve in With Hasan in Gaza, through this edited and refashioned material, is, in many ways, astonishing. Resurrecting once-discarded videotapes implies a meagre and variable fill, and when Hasan amateurishly directs the camera in one interlude, the effect is as nausea-inducing as it is intriguing. Yet the handover of authorship is remarkably reintroduced at film’s close, and in these ambivalent and playful moments Aljafari exceeds the mere recovery of images, cultivating instead an urgent and frankly upsetting cinematic language.
Joseph Owen, occasional film critic, is a research fellow at the University of Southampton.