Born from a fortunate accident — the miraculous rediscovery of three MiniDV tapes, forgotten for 24 years, filmed in Gaza in 2001 — With Hasan in Gaza, the new film by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari, is a portrait of a territory erased by bombs and what many describe as a genocide. Presented in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival, the film stands as a powerful testament — a tribute to Gaza and its people, at a time of profound annihilation of Palestinian existence
Memory, loss, identity, and resistance have long formed the backbone of Kamal Aljafari’s body of work. In Al Sateh (2006), an intimate film made after reuniting with his family in Ramle, the director questions whether it is possible to finish building a house one no longer belongs to. In Port of Memory (2010), Aljafari turns to Jaffa, the city known as the “Bride of the Mediterranean,” where a man faces the threat of losing his home, while two women resist in their own ways. Recollection (2015) is a visual journey through rare archival footage, including Israeli and American films (Chuck Norris even makes an appearance), shot between 1960 and 1990, reclaiming cinema’s gaze on the city.
With Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022), Aljafari creates a disturbing, experimental piece inspired by Dante’s Inferno, where the sound of an airplane dominates everything, heralding an imminent attack. In 2024, evoking Israeli aerial surveillance and the ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land, he released UNDR, a 15-minute visual essay in which helicopter footage surveys the desert, capturing human interventions, farmers at work, children playing — all while explosives reshape the landscape. Finally, in A Fidai Film (2024), Aljafari performs an act of cinematic sabotage in response to the looting of the Palestinian Research Center’s archive in Beirut in 1982, crafting a counter-narrative of resistance that seeks to recover and reconstruct stolen memories.
In With Hasan in Gaza (2025), we follow the director on a journey through the Gaza Strip alongside Hasan, a local guide, traveling from north to south in search of Abdel Rahim, a man he met in 1989 when both were imprisoned as teenagers in Israel’s Naqab Desert. At the time, studying film in Cologne, Aljafari intended to use the footage for a project on youth incarceration. The project never materialized — until now. The film that was never made has now emerged, in the wake of Gaza’s devastation, as an act of memory preservation.
By capturing Gaza in 2001 — a vibrant space filled with children playing, bustling markets, lively cafés, and neighborhoods alive with natural conviviality, even under constant surveillance (Gaza has long been a prison under Israeli military control) — Aljafari reveals what has since been reduced to rubble by Israel, in a disproportionate and genocidal offensive following the Hamas attack, according to UN reports. Once again in the filmmaker’s work, the shattered walls are rebuilt with the cement of memory. Classical Arabic songs, including those by Nagat El-Sagheera, chosen by the director, intensify the sense of longing and summon a cinematic reflection on the relentless passage of time.
Amplifying the tragic weight of today’s mass destruction and the deaths of tens of thousands, the viewer is inevitably led to ask the same question Aljafari evokes: how many of these faces have been erased? How many names no longer exist?
Without knowing what became of Hasan or the others in the footage, the director joins a collective mourning — one deeply personal, as his own maternal family, originally from Jaffa, was displaced to Gaza in 1948. This act of remembrance is thus a fusion of the intimate and the historical — a personal reckoning with a national tragedy.