August 19th 2024
Film Review
ENG
VERDICT: Kamal Aljafari reclaims and re-envisages looted images from Beirut's Palestine Research Centre in his moving and enigmatic intervention into the territory of memories.
Cinema is the territory of memories, and with his latest creative act of reclamation, A Fidai Film, Berlin-based Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari recovers and re-envisages historical images looted from the archives of the Palestine Research Centre by the Israeli army when it occupied Beirut in Lebanon, where the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was headquartered, in the summer of 1982. The masterfully assembled and moving documentary assemblage, as poetic as it is threaded through with horror and indignation, screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival in the Doha Film Institute’s programme, and was previously awarded at documentary festivals including Visions du Reel in Switzerland, FIDMarseille in France and Dokufest in Kosovo. Conceptual yet poetic, and thrilling in its activist ambition of remaking the seen world in more just terms rather than simply revealing the tyrannies of power that cause the disenfranchised suffering, the film is an evocative and enigmatic addition to Aljafari’s respected body of work, which revisits Palestine as a beloved place, a homeland and an action of remembering within the cinematic frame (the Arabic word “fidai” refers to one who dedicates their life to a cause.) It should enjoy ample more berths at festivals with space for politically engaged docs that dare a more radical form, finding its most receptive audiences among those accustomed to a degree of experimental rigour.
If the collective identity of a people can be stored in physical objects, writings and reproduced images of course figure large — and to confiscate these traces amounts to the wilful erasure of that people’s right to exist, this work powerfully contends. A Fidai Film is Aljafari’s political act of resistance against this method of oppression and the Israeli regime’s attempt to control the narrative of the region. The footage, in a mix of black-and-white and colour, is alive with faces. Crowds bustle down streets alongside horses and carts, in an era before the Nakba of 1948 that displaced around half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population. In later footage, searches, indignities and armed surveillance by patrolling soldiers is a constant. Visages occasionally appear close-in, their steady gazes burning through the screen right at us, as if declaring that they are here, now and for all time. There are buildings, muddy refugee camps and ruins, too, structures built or demolished and makeshift shelters resorted to as belonging on land is asserted or denied.
The Israeli Ministry of Defence relabelled the previously well-ordered material they looted. Rather than diligently captioning them again, Aljafari has scrubbed out new interpretations and definitions in painterly red on the screen, freeing them from the Israeli government’s co-opted authority over Palestinian reality and leaving them (and us) unmoored from written bearings. Crimson interventions, luminescent like corrosive lava, also alter images, streaking frames like blood on a window, or anonymising soldiers. Playful and audacious in the liberties taken, these animated splashes and stains reveal the vulnerability of representations to tampering and alteration at the hands of whoever claims proprietorship over them. Real blood, too, has been captured in some photographs, pooling under heads or torsos in evidence of atrocities against Arab bodies.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shias followed shortly after the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, and a haunted air of loss and grief seeps through these frames. It’s assisted by an ambient soundscape, passages from Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani and his recollections of occupation, dislocation and exodus, and looping lines of a child singing a rhyme that refers to two windows in an attic — a home storage space, within sight lines. Aljafari’s surprised messenger exchange with an acquaintance who tells him he has got his hands on some of the looted documents and items runs down the screen at the end, a teasing addendum that hints at the source of this reformulated archival material, and at a kind of underground of resilient truth that will always subvert and show up chinks in official propaganda versions.
Director, Screenwriter, Photography: Kamal Aljafari
Editing: Kamal Aljafari, Yannig Willmann
Producers: Kamal Aljafari, Flavia Mazzarino
Music: Simon Fisher Turner
Production company: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Sales: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Venue: Sarajevo (Doha Film Institute programme)
In English, Arabic and Hebrew
78 minutes
Cinema is the territory of memories, and with his latest creative act of reclamation, A Fidai Film, Berlin-based Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari recovers and re-envisages historical images looted from the archives of the Palestine Research Centre by the Israeli army when it occupied Beirut in Lebanon, where the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was headquartered, in the summer of 1982. The masterfully assembled and moving documentary assemblage, as poetic as it is threaded through with horror and indignation, screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival in the Doha Film Institute’s programme, and was previously awarded at documentary festivals including Visions du Reel in Switzerland, FIDMarseille in France and Dokufest in Kosovo. Conceptual yet poetic, and thrilling in its activist ambition of remaking the seen world in more just terms rather than simply revealing the tyrannies of power that cause the disenfranchised suffering, the film is an evocative and enigmatic addition to Aljafari’s respected body of work, which revisits Palestine as a beloved place, a homeland and an action of remembering within the cinematic frame (the Arabic word “fidai” refers to one who dedicates their life to a cause.) It should enjoy ample more berths at festivals with space for politically engaged docs that dare a more radical form, finding its most receptive audiences among those accustomed to a degree of experimental rigour.
If the collective identity of a people can be stored in physical objects, writings and reproduced images of course figure large — and to confiscate these traces amounts to the wilful erasure of that people’s right to exist, this work powerfully contends. A Fidai Film is Aljafari’s political act of resistance against this method of oppression and the Israeli regime’s attempt to control the narrative of the region. The footage, in a mix of black-and-white and colour, is alive with faces. Crowds bustle down streets alongside horses and carts, in an era before the Nakba of 1948 that displaced around half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population. In later footage, searches, indignities and armed surveillance by patrolling soldiers is a constant. Visages occasionally appear close-in, their steady gazes burning through the screen right at us, as if declaring that they are here, now and for all time. There are buildings, muddy refugee camps and ruins, too, structures built or demolished and makeshift shelters resorted to as belonging on land is asserted or denied.
The Israeli Ministry of Defence relabelled the previously well-ordered material they looted. Rather than diligently captioning them again, Aljafari has scrubbed out new interpretations and definitions in painterly red on the screen, freeing them from the Israeli government’s co-opted authority over Palestinian reality and leaving them (and us) unmoored from written bearings. Crimson interventions, luminescent like corrosive lava, also alter images, streaking frames like blood on a window, or anonymising soldiers. Playful and audacious in the liberties taken, these animated splashes and stains reveal the vulnerability of representations to tampering and alteration at the hands of whoever claims proprietorship over them. Real blood, too, has been captured in some photographs, pooling under heads or torsos in evidence of atrocities against Arab bodies.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shias followed shortly after the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, and a haunted air of loss and grief seeps through these frames. It’s assisted by an ambient soundscape, passages from Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani and his recollections of occupation, dislocation and exodus, and looping lines of a child singing a rhyme that refers to two windows in an attic — a home storage space, within sight lines. Aljafari’s surprised messenger exchange with an acquaintance who tells him he has got his hands on some of the looted documents and items runs down the screen at the end, a teasing addendum that hints at the source of this reformulated archival material, and at a kind of underground of resilient truth that will always subvert and show up chinks in official propaganda versions.
Director, Screenwriter, Photography: Kamal Aljafari
Editing: Kamal Aljafari, Yannig Willmann
Producers: Kamal Aljafari, Flavia Mazzarino
Music: Simon Fisher Turner
Production company: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Sales: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Venue: Sarajevo (Doha Film Institute programme)
In English, Arabic and Hebrew
78 minutes