In the Locarno main competition entry With Hasan in Gaza [+lee también:
entrevista: Kamal Aljafari
ficha de la película], Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari turns a rediscovered personal archive into an urgent political and deeply humane act. What begins as an almost private excavation of memory quickly becomes a vivid testament to a place and a people caught in the crossfire of history – a work whose resonance is amplified by the current devastation in Gaza.

The film’s starting point is deceptively simple. In 2001, armed with a MiniDV camera, Aljafari set out to find a man he had known in prison in 1989, a friend who had since vanished in the fog of war. Accompanied by Hasan – a local guide whose fate, too, has slipped into uncertainty – he travelled from the north to the south of Gaza, recording what he saw along the way. The three tapes he shot lay dormant for more than two decades, until they resurfaced recently, acquiring a weight and a meaning they could not have had at the time of filming.

Aljafari’s lens drifts through streets, markets, slums and beaches, capturing the fleeting textures of daily life: children playing by the sea, shopkeepers tending to their goods, old men absorbed in a card game in a café in the shade. These moments, which in 2001 were already unfolding under the shadow of occupation, now feel like precious fragments of an irretrievably lost normalcy – one that, in the present, reads as pure bliss compared to the horrors of today.

The film’s raw aesthetic is born of necessity. The handheld MiniDV footage has not been polished into something sleek; instead, it retains its grain, its occasional shakiness and its abrupt cuts. This unvarnished texture is essential to the film’s emotional force, reminding the viewer that we are witnessing reality as it was, not reconstructed or reframed for the sake of artifice. And yet, Aljafari’s eye for composition and rhythm still asserts itself, even within the limitations of the material.

What makes With Hasan in Gaza more than an exercise in archival assembly is its sense of time – of the shifting relationship between past and present. The Gaza of 2001 was already shaped by violence and displacement, with some seeds of today’s catastrophe already planted and others vigorously taking root. By reintroducing this footage in 2025, Aljafari confronts us with the cycles of loss, the persistence of erasure, and the stubborn traces of humanity that survive in between.

Even without any on-screen commentary, the images carry a political charge, precisely because they focus on the human: the gestures, the glances, the rhythms of a life that was always precarious but never devoid of dignity.

Ultimately, With Hasan in Gaza serves less as an artistic experiment and more as a testament left by a witness. It invites us to consider how cinema can preserve – and perhaps restore – spaces that have been physically destroyed but must remain alive in memory.

With Hasan in Gaza is a Palestinian-German-French-Qatari co-production staged by Kamal Aljafari Productions.