LIAS Film Series: "With Hasan in Gaza"

Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 7 p.m.
Location: SCALA Arthouse Cinema | Apothekenstr. 17 | 21335 Lüneburg

LIAS Senior Fellow Heidi Grunebaum

Kamal Aljafari’s film With Hasan in Gaza is the result of an act of rediscovering and recontextualising archival material. Three MiniDV cassettes, which the director recently found in his archive, contain recordings from 2001 that were made during a trip through the Gaza Strip. Originally, this trip was part of a personal search for a prison acquaintance from 1989; on the way, Aljafari is accompanied by a local guide named Hasan, whose later fate remains unknown.
The film does not follow a classic documentary dramaturgy, but instead unfolds along this journey from the north to the south of Gaza, presenting a series of fragmentary observations: streets, landscapes, conversations, casual encounters, and everyday situations. In retrospect, these seemingly unspectacular images take on a special historical and emotional density. From today’s perspective, they appear as visual testimonies to a social and urban fabric that has since undergone profound changes or partially disappeared.
In this sense, With Hasan in Gaza can be understood as a form of cinematic archaeology project. The material is not merely presented in a documentary manner, but is reframed as a medium of memory. Aljafari is less interested in reconstructing a coherent story than in exploring how images from the past can structure present experience. The camera records a series of fleeting moments in everyday life, whose meaning only unfolds with the passage of time.
The film thus moves at the intersection of documentary, essay film, and personal archive cinema. The footage functions both as a historical trace and as a poetic reflection on loss, absence, and the fragility of memory. By re-editing and re-examining the material in the present, Aljafari turns the 2001 journey into a retrospective meditation on places and people whose traces may have been irretrievably lost.
With Hasan in Gaza premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival and fits into Aljafari’s ongoing artistic practice, which deals with image archives, colonial and political image regimes, and the question of how film can function as a medium of memory and reappropriation.

Free admission

Palestine, Germany, France, Qatar, 2025 | Director: Kamal Aljafar | 106 min. | Arabic original with English subtitles