02.12.24, 20:30, Eye on Palestine, A Fidai Film (2024)

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded southern Lebanon and reached West Beirut, where the Palestinian Research Centre had built up a vast archive of photographs, films and documents since 1965. This archive was taken as spoils of war.

Using this event as a starting point, Kamal Aljafari constructs an alternative Palestinian visual memory, which he calls ‘the camera of the dispossessed’. A Fidai Film is a unique blend of found footage and experimental cinema, with collage-like elements dancing around the red of mourning and resistance.

The documentary shows rare moving images of Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, accompanied by a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by Palestinian writer Gassan Kanafani (1936-1972), among others. Aljafari poetically interweaves history with art, grief with longing, resistance with sabotage. Every image, every montage, bears the marks of this rich, layered mix of personal and collective memories.