Kamal Aljafari • Director of A Fidai Film
"This film is not only about Palestine, but about any place that has been occupied and any people subjected to oppression"
- The Palestinian director talks about his feature built from archival images looted by the Israeli army that the filmmaker reworked to express the reality of oppression his people are experiencing
After winning Best Film in the Burning Lights competition at Visions du Réel, A Fidai Film [+see also:
film review
interview: Kamal Aljafari
film profile] by Kamal Aljafari graced IDFA's Signed selection. We met with the Palestinian director to talk about his film, made up of images from the archive of the Palestine Research Centre, which was seized by Israel in 1982.
Cineuropa: A sentence that struck me in your film is the inter-title "The camera of the dispossessed". If the archive looted in 1982 from Beirut is in the hands of the Israeli state, how did you get access to it?
Kamal Aljafari: There are two types of images, one kind comes from the archive looted in 1982, the other from different Israeli archives which are open resources. The archive material that belongs to the Palestinian Research Centre passed from one hand to another, [starting] from people who have access to it, and it is now in the hands of the Israeli army. Some of these people made an academic career writing about it, and in a way, for me, they are the second looters of this archive because they wouldn’t share this with the Palestinians. I had to persist with a few of them who accepted in the end, allowing me limited time to review the material and sharing the images in a very low quality. The irony is that the people who detained these images claim to be on the side of Palestinians because they operate in the field of postcolonial studies. The material that I used is very little compared to what they have access to. With the concept of "The camera of the dispossessed", I was referring to the inability to access your own images and images of occupied countries. The "camera" is made by these two kinds of archival images, one of which was catalogued by the Israeli army with text over the images which I scratched away. I also worked with different films, fiction films and documentaries that I found online in different Israeli archives, to set them free from colonial use. In Israeli history, Palestinians exist not only as a physical presence but also as ghosts.
In your work with these images, you operate a further, second manipulation on them, getting very different results from those obtained by Israel. As the title of the film suggests, you don’t shy away from the idea of being a partisan and of the impossibility of a neutral point of view, while talking about a process of colonisation that is ongoing.
KA: For me, making this film is an act of resistance. It's quite shocking to see the internal use of those images by the army of Israel, where everything according to them becomes a danger, even a child walking on the mud. For them, a child, a woman who cooks in a tent and a guerrilla fighter are on the same level, they're all the enemy, and this is exactly the process of dehumanisation that has happened to the Palestinian people and that is allowing the mass killing still taking place in Gaza today. With my work, I wanted to give a contemporary dimension to these images, which don't belong only to the past, because in the case of Palestine we are talking about a past that is still present. Scratching the writings added by the Israeli army, transforming the sea into a sea of blood or painting gunshots in red are artistic choices that are commenting on what is happening now. With time, I realised that the manipulation transforms those images into something very emotional that somehow allows me to touch the viewer in a direct way.
Who shot those archival images? There is also a scene that is taken from an Israeli film with dialogue reflecting on sentimental relationships…
KA: In that specific scene, the couple talk about their relationship in a way that is very bizarre and it represents subconsciously what Israel has done to this country. It reminds me of the Israeli expression “shooting and crying”: they shoot the Palestinians, then they cry about it, “why did you make me do it?” As if it were the fault of the Palestinians. The colonial intelligence of Israel always presents them as victims, even when they steal from Palestinians. The Palestine Research Centre was created to document the history of the Palestinians, it contained books, photographs, and films. Amongst them, we could find films shot by the British in their colonial period, which coincides with the beginning of the oppression, and they were probably shot by the British Army, documenting their own crimes, which shows the obsession of fascist governments with documenting everything. Other films contained in the archive were made by Palestinians, for propaganda, or filming refugee camps to denounce their conditions. Some films were by the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), who left Lebanon in 1982 when the war started, leaving all their archives to the Palestine Research Centre. All of this was stolen by the Israeli army and it shows how, from the beginning, the state of Israel has tried to delegitimise the UNRWA, also stealing their archive. This process is showing the ultimate will of Israel to destroy Palestine and its society, which culminates with the bombing of hospitals and schools. The idea of A Fidai Film is to show how the past is happening again and again; the burning of people, the arresting of men has been happening since the 1920s. I don’t think there is such a thing as an objective image; any image is subjective, and in a way, this is an autobiographical film because it deals with the country I come from. I work freely and this work is trying to make order, paving the way to express myself and the relationship that I have with these images in a way that becomes universal. Finally, this film is not only about Palestine, but about any place that has been occupied and any people subjected to oppression.
It’s interesting that you mentioned the oppression of Palestine as universal because one of the main arguments used by Israel to make their crimes and colonialism morally acceptable is their exceptionality, as people, as a state…
KA: I think that mentioning this exceptionality is falling into the trap of Israeli propaganda. The film wants to show what happened but is not necessarily about understanding the context of what we are seeing. It’s about feeling empathy for the conditions of the oppressed people, and I have done this through cinematic language and montage, which is at the core of this film.
Could you expand on the other elements of your style such as the music and the colours, in particular the use of red to symbolise the violence that characterises the history of Palestine?
KA: The red was a very clear choice from the beginning, to make this violence visible. One of the other things that emerges clearly is the demonisations made of the other, the non-white, the non-European. The fact that the non-white is vilified has been introjected by the majority of people. When we see a person of colour, we are sometimes suspicious because of the colonial process of demonisation that has been going on for hundreds of years, with the media as one of the main vehicles of this ideology. When Palestinians die, we write numbers, but when Israelis do, we write their names, in a continuous process of dehumanisation. I think sound is a better medium to express empathy; when we hear someone suffering, we are thinking less about the colour of their skin. With this particular use of sound, I wanted to create a humanistic and universal approach. While working with Attila Faravelli, the challenge was to find a sound that was at the same time non-familiar and communicative, ultimately blending all these elements to create a universal approach.
