15/11/2024 - Kamal Aljafari manipulates and reassembles archive footage from the Palestine Research Center, which was seized by Israel in 1982, to highlight its propagandistic use by the State of Israeli

There are countless different ways to make a film about Palestine, some of which are incredibly radical. This is the case for Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film [+see also:
interview: Kamal Aljafari
film profile] - which graced the IDFA’s Signed selection after winning Best Film in the Visions du Réel Festival’s Burning Lights line-up - whose main strength lies in its editing. The movie’s images hail from the Palestine Research Center archive, which was stationed in Beirut until 1982 when it was seized by the Israeli army. Adopting an adventurous approach, Aljafari has managed to retrieve some of this archive material, which is still in Israeli hands, and assemble it in such a way as to tell a story about Palestine which belongs to the Palestinian people, highlighting how the Israeli state twisted this footage for propagandistic purposes. This hijacked meaning is blown to smithereens by A Fidai Film, whose title alone suggests a film of resistance and struggle (fidāʾī means “they who sacrifice themselves”, as well as being the title of Palestine’s national anthem).

In addition to his conceptual use of editing, Aljafari manipulates the footage, experimenting with bursts of material with dripping red tones which denotes the images’ brutality, rubbing out the writing superimposed by the Israeli army, in an artistic decision which primarily aims to be an act of justice. The term used to describe this endeavour is “The camera of the dispossessed”, through which the director alludes to the importance and the right of the Palestinian people to have their own version of this story, which hasn’t been rewritten by the Israeli authorities or by western media. And among the most incredible images appearing in Aljafari’s film are those of Israeli soldiers documenting the seizure of the archive in occupied Beirut in the early ‘80s. Seeing the archive as spoils of war, Kamal Aljafari’s mission consists of returning those images to the Palestinian community to which they belong.

As a result, we see images shot by the Palestinian authorities, focused on denouncing the conditions of refugees in camps, and those shot by the occupying authorities, including the British army, to document the newly conquered land from a colonial viewpoint; a viewpoint which Edward Said previously denounced in his famous essay Orientalism, published way back in 1978, which analysed the ways in which Europe portrayed what was known as the Orient (and which is now called “the Middle East”). Accompanying this manipulated archive material is a sound landscape devised by Attila Faravelli and music composed by Simon-Fisher Turner, which, when combined with the film’s particular editing approach, help to subvert the meaning of these images, and to free them. In this sense, A Fidai Film is a crucial testimony to the counter-power of images, which Aljafari previously reflected upon in his earlier work Recollection, which saw him rewriting the story of Israeli cinema in his own way, and exploring how the memory of an entire people can be reconstructed and how they have the right to represent themselves or exist.

A Fidai Film was produced by Kamal Aljafari Production who are also handling the movie’s distribution and sales.

(Translated from Italian)