This is my first film, which I have never made. With Hasan in Gaza unfolds as a haunting meditation on memory, erasure, and witness. Kamal Aljafari retrieves three long-forgotten MiniDV tapes shot during a two-day journey across Gaza in November 2001, a search for a former prison mate, that now stand as fragile documents of everyday life before it was irreversibly altered. The footage is raw and unvarnished: rushing through streets, markets, beaches, card games, children playing and pleading, “Film me!” These quotidian instants shimmer with piercing tenderness, precious now that much of that world may no longer exist.
The film plays these frames almost as they were shot, preserving their texture, the grain, the unsteady gaze, the time-stamped spontaneity. Music by Simon Fisher Turner and Attila Faravelli refracts the images in melodic echoes, never sentimental but deeply elegiac. Critics have hailed the film as a raw yet poignant snapshot of Gaza during the Second Intifada and a testament left by a witness, an urgent plea to remember that cinema can keep alive what geography cannot.
