Past Is Present
By Lovia Gyarkye
With Hasan in Gaza
Dir. Kamal Aljafari, Qatar/Germany/France, Cinema Guild
In 2001, the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari set out to find a man he’d known while imprisoned in the late 1980s, when he was only 17. With only his memories, Aljafari embarked on a road trip through Gaza with a guide named Hasan in search of his friend. Together, they captured the realities of an occupied territory and its people on a MiniDV camcorder. Decades later, Aljafari, a celebrated filmmaker and artist whose work deals in the elusive grammar of memory, rediscovered the footage and compiled the material into a haunting historical testimony. With Hasan in Gaza functions as a travelogue of occupation and an archive of a people besieged by Israel’s version of Manifest Destiny. That the places Aljafari visited and the conditions he witnessed so eerily foreshadow the recent devastation of Gaza reflects the insanity of a history that rhymes.
While many viewers will know Aljafari for his feature debut The Roof (2006), With Hasan in Gaza is functionally the director’s first film. At the time of recording, Aljafari was 28 and living in Germany. He had left Palestine a few years before for film school and came back to make a movie about his experience in prison as a teenager. Not only does With Hasan in Gaza possess the energetic devotion of someone newly armed with and aware of the camera’s possibilities, there’s also a sense of fugitivity in the filmmaking. As Aljafari and Hasan drive around, they film carefully and with a keen eye for Israeli Defense Force soldiers who might mistake their camera for a weapon.
With Hasan in Gaza opens with a shot of a checkpoint, a physical manifestation of Palestinian confinement in Gaza. Aljafari and Hasan will continue to encounter these barricades and talk about them with the people they meet on the road. The director mostly shoots from the inside of a car, where he sits with Hasan, who fills him in on all that’s changed about his homeland. With these early moments, Aljafari establishes the haunting atmosphere of occupation, one defined by overwhelming surveillance and restriction.
Aljafari has returned to a region reeling from the Second Intifada. Despite announcements of a ceasefire and calls for peace, that chapter of the conflict lasted from 2000 to 2005. While they drive around, Hasan points out the new buildings erected by Israeli settlers and mentions the refugee camps that have become home to thousands of Palestinians. The pair make a trip to a market for breakfast and head to the beach, where they talk to a father who has spent the last eight years in prison. Standing by the water, as his children frolic, the man reflects on how long it’s been since he has seen the sea.
Disquieting testimonies like these punctuate the long stretches of exterior shots—buildings, people milling about, the landscape as seen from the side of the road—that make up most of With Hasan in Gaza. As Aljafari and Hasan travel through the city, they collect the stories of Palestinians who have lost their families and loved ones to Israel’s violence. One man takes the pair through an area of demolished homes, pointing out artifacts that reveal how little time the families had to evacuate. Aljafari uses wider shots in these moments to take in the breadth of destruction: buildings left half-standing, debris, crushed baby carriers, and other signs of a wrecked domestic life are everywhere. In another scene, Hasan points out how people repair their homes, repatching walls that have been shelled or putting pillows and sandbags in windows blown out by bombs. “You see how it is broken?” one woman asks while pointing to a part of the building just out of frame. “Last night, after they talked about a ceasefire.”
Part of what’s striking about With Hasan in Gaza is how this archive of 2001 mirrors the occasion of its release. Conversations about the toll of the occupation and the struggle of daily life that Aljafari has with the people parallel discussions in recent documentaries like No Other Land, the Oscar-winning film about the destruction of Masafer Yatta in the Occupied West Bank, and From Ground Zero, an anthology film produced by the Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi. There are moments in the doc that speak to current headlines, exposing patterns within the occupation: announced and subsequently broken ceasefires; soldiers deployed daily to roam the streets; bombs exploding in the distance at night, checkpoints and the insubstantial tours by the United Nations. When someone encourages the woman pointing out the broken windows to elaborate on her situation, to expound on her frustrations, she replies: “What should I say? We’re tired of speaking.”
And yet, as with all oppressed people, they still have stories to tell. Hidden in this makeshift travelogue is a narrative touched by the resistance that figures in Aljafari’s later works. Since The Roof, the filmmaker has used his experimental projects to construct counternarratives, ones in which he centers the rich history of Palestinian people and their land. In Port of Memory (2010), a narrative drama about a family in Jaffa on the verge of displacement, Aljafari focuses on rituals that anchor the characters. Six years later, in Recollection, he removes Israelis from the footage to tell a different story of Jaffa, which both comments on and combats the historical erasure of Palestinians. In With Hasan in Gaza, a rebellious nature lives on in the children, who gleefully ask Aljafari and Hasan to film them or to take a picture. At the early moment on the beach, the kids dance around, hold up the fish they caught and smile as widely as they can for the camera. Their enthusiasm in the face of persistent struggle is a damning reminder of how Israel and its co-conspirators have justified the murder of children for decades, but it’s also evidence of endurance. There’s a moment in the middle of the film when a curious little boy looks at the camera and asks: “Who is he filming this for?” I like to think the answer is—for you.