A Fidai Film

It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari. 
One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to a wholly new level of fame – and deservedly so. Often traveling alongside his latest short film, UNDR (which premiered at IFFR), A Fidai Film has been screened in almost three dozen festivals, while Aljafari has been the subject of two major retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives and IndieLisboa. At the same time, tightening restrictions around pro-Palestinian discourse in Germany have prompted Aljafari to relocate from the country he had been living and working in for decades and quitting Berlin for Paris, where he is developing a new film, based on footage that he had shot in Gaza more than twenty years ago.
A Fidai Film (fida’i meaning “sacrifice” in Arabic, doubling as a direct reference to the Palestinian national anthem) is, at its core, a radical act of re-appropriation. Drawing inspiration from the writings of revolutionary poet Ghassan Kanafani, Aljafari uses footage from a PLO archive that was pillaged by the IDF during the sack of Beirut in 1982, which the filmmaker painstakingly tracked down. The film reconstructs the contents of the archive while taking note of how the material was damaged and altered after being looted and relocated. Subversively repurposing the technique of color blocking—traditionally associated with censorship, yet deployed here as a means to both “erase” the occupation within the footage and underline its inherent violence in stark shades of red—Aljafari paints the history of modern Palestine from the years of the British Mandate to the early 2000s, paying close attention to historical traumas such as the Nakba, the Six-Day-War and the Lebanese War. One chilling scene features an interview with an army general who describes the footage that was discovered within the archive as “a large collection of images used for propaganda: refugees, a funeral, a picture of one of the PLO members executed by the phalangists, and so on.” 
I sat down with Aljafari at the 2024 edition of the Viennale and discussed at length what made him shift from traditional forms of documentary filmmaking towards found footage, his concept of “the camera of the dispossessed” and how he sourced the materials in A Fidai Film.
Filmmaker: Back in 2015, you made Recollection, which is about Jaffa being used as the backdrop for fictional cinema. That was your first film that wasn’t composed of footage that you shot by yourself. What attracted you to archives and what made you stay with them, as an approach?
Aljafari: It really happened by chance. In 2011 or 2012, I was in London for a screening of my film, Port of Memory (2010). I checked into my hotel room and the TV had this thing that looked very funny. It said: “Welcome, Kamal Aljafari.” Hotels don’t do that anymore. It stays there non-stop until you use the TV, so I changed the channel, then went to take a shower. By the time I came out, there was a film playing on the TV that, for some reason, I hadn’t seen before, but I could recognize the shots. The film was The Delta Force (1986), starring Chuck Norris, and I sat and watched the film for the first time. This film was shot in Jaffa in the early ’80s when I was a kid. I remember passing by the film team when they were preparing for the shot that I had just seen for the first time. And it was, you know, a film with Chuck Norris—a very cliché and typical American story of American hostages being kidnapped by some terrorists. Jaffa was used as the backdrop for a script that was set in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, so it wasn’t even set in Jaffa.
I remembered that as a kid, I passed by and saw this group of children and people waiting excitedly for shooting to begin, and this car coming towards us, a Volkswagen van with two blonde men inside. One was the driver, and the other was shooting out of the open door. That was Chuck Norris shooting with an Uzi (laughs). As a kid, you watch this and it’s very entertaining to see that kind of film shoot, and you don’t understand what’s going on. The van carried the name of my school, Saint Joseph. I went to one of these Catholic schools in Jaffa as a child. All of this came back to me when I was watching the film. I began to be very interested in the backgrounds that were caught in this film. Many of the places that I saw in the film did not exist anymore physically. 

This is how I ended up making the first [found footage film], Recollection, which was made of footage that I found in different fiction features released as early as the ’60s up until the early ‘90s, when the last film was shot in Jaffa. And, of course, it was the backdrop of somewhere else: it wasn’t clear which country we were in; it was some Middle Eastern country, and it was with Van Damme. (laughs) So there were all these stars coming there. Apart from the Israeli fiction films, many were musicals—a kind of celebratory gathering, in exile, of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi culture. Now they are living here, it’s their country. And Jaffa was very helpful, in fact,  because it’s an old place, it has a history, so it was systematically used for many Israeli films. Later on, in the early ’80s, it began to be used as a set for war films: sometimes it’s Afghanistan, sometimes it’s even Peru. 
The more I researched, the more I realized that, yeah, cinema really played a role in occupying the place, and that raises many questions. Why would you use this Palestinian city as your main film set? Because it provided the producers, the directors, with narrative. If you shoot your film in Tel Aviv, which looks like a modern city, then it looks like a settler city. In Jaffa, you claim history: “We have been here for a long time, look how old this place is.” This was the whole concept. So, in Recollection, I wanted to kind of deconstruct all of that by removing the actors from the foreground and focusing on the background, the city. Then I started finding all these people that were in the background, which were not part of the original films. They were just passing by, not even extras.
All these places that I knew from my childhood only existed virtually, because in reality the city gradually got destroyed, and cinema actually took part in the destruction of these places, like in Delta Force. You see Chuck Norris freeing all these hostages, which were kept in an old building, a school that had been abandoned for many years by the sea. For the final scene, the municipality of Tel Aviv let them use live explosions to destroy the building. So, beyond merely shooting a scene, these explosions basically produced cinematic violence, the building did not exist anymore. This is where cinema turns into something that is part of destruction, of a colonial project. 
It was an important stage in my relationship to cinema. I was a naive person, in a way. I wanted to make films, to shoot films, but then I realized to shoot films, to capture places really has a meaning behind it when people do it. Recollection took me to other projects that also came by chance, like the footage shot by my father I found, in Unusual Summer (2020). Fidai Film is about these archives that were looted in 1982, then I would find other things that interest me. I feel like I’m not completely in control of what I want to do. 
Now, I have a script that I wrote and we got some funding for it, a fiction film that I want to shoot in Jaffa. Just before moving to Paris, I wanted to digitize the rushes of my early two films, The Roof and Port of Memory. When I was looking at the tapes, I saw one that had the words “Hassan,” “Gaza” and “2000” written on it. I didn’t know what it was. I thought someone gave it to me, perhaps. I went to the place where I wanted to digitize the tapes and asked the person working there if they could play it first, and while watching the material, I see shots in Gaza, in a car, and then… I see myself in the mirror of the car with a camera. I couldn’t even remember that I shot this. So now I’m making this film which is called The Gaza Tape, that I actually shot when I was 28—the first thing that I ever shot after finishing my studies and coming back to Palestine. And really, I had never watched this tape. Never. I shot it, then I got busy with my studies and other things, and it comes to the surface just now, totally by chance. 
Filmmaker: The way that you find films is quite fascinating, which, in turn, makes your work and practice as a filmmaker very versatile. There’s a vast array of archives that you take a look at, from mainstream cinema to tapes from your father’s domestic surveillance camera. Ultimately, this is coupled with a fascinating way of looking at these images: finding meanings that are not originally there, disrupting their original semantics and discourse through montage, which is also deeply political. Could you tell us more about how you look for, and at images?
Aljafari: Every material has its own dynamic in a way, which imposes a certain language. When you look at it in UNDR, you can see that the way I structured it is owed to the fact that I found so many shots that were going back to the same location over and over again. So, this repetition became the language of the film. There is something quite interesting about finding things and working with already-existing footage: you can study patterns, especially if you go back in time and look at historical images. All of these projects are, in a way, coming from the past, even the one that I’m working on now. But they are related to the present, of course, and I try new things that are in a way related to the material that I’m working with, and related to their materiality. So, there is no “method” of how to do things because every time there’s something different. With this new film I’m working on, I’m not editing it. I’m keeping it the way I shot it, in the same order. I’m just trimming sometimes, making it a bit shorter, but I’m going to keep it as it is. This is what the tape somehow imposed on me. I like to work with these ideas and, finally, cinema is all about putting things in a certain order.

Filmmaker: I’d like to ask you about this theoretically and politically solid concept that you’ve advanced in the past couple of years: the cinema of the dispossessed. How did you arrive at this concept? What strikes me about it is how it approaches the topic of the gaze—it called to mind bell hooks’ concept of the oppositional gaze. Of course, she was writing from the perspective of a woman of color living in the United States, but I think that her argument lends itself to extensions: that is, otherized people who are subject to imperialism/colonialism have a sort of a priori critical position towards representations of themselves. She says that it’s a sort of “sine qua non” condition of otherized spectators, unlike white, western spectators, who have to learn how to deconstruct their perspective. How does this tie in with the counter-narratives that you propose, with your method of reappropriation?  
Aljafari: I think it was really something happening gradually, as I was saying before. But I also think that cinema has always been the tool of people in power. Like, even the first films [commissioned] by the Lumières, where they would go everywhere in the world and film. They went to Palestine too, for example, and I’m using some of their shots in my film. [Their commissioned travelogues were] also a tool of colonialism, a tool of imperialism, of control used against the people from in these places, which is most of the world (apart from Europe, which is just a tiny minority). For the rest of the world, it took some time until they had the ability, technically speaking, to use this tool for themselves, and until today we are caught in this colonial gaze. And it’s so difficult to set ourselves free from it. If you look at cinema coming from North Africa, for example, even if the films are made are made by people from North Africa, they have a very colonial look—they look like French movies. It’s as if the person who was making the film is taking the gaze of a colonialist.
So, I think it’s challenging for many people to take this language and make it into something that is universal and humanistic, and not a tool of colonialism and oppression. In my case as a Palestinian, I mean… an entire nation got displaced and we couldn’t even film in Palestine, for the longest time. I think that one of the first Palestinian fiction films [not shot during the 40s and lost during the subsequent bombings of 1948] was made in the early ‘80s. 
Filmmaker: Yes, Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981).
Aljafari: Exactly. How is that possible? That is because the life of Palstinian society got interrupted. And there were people in the ‘40s in Jaffa, this man [Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan, 1915-1987] who shot a film and created a studio in Jaffa, but then it all got lost and he became a refugee. So, everything was gone: you lost the country and the ability to film this country as well. That’s why, in A Fidai Film, one of the main concepts behind working with this material was basically to go and find traces of the country. which could only be found in films and propaganda shot by colonialists: the British, the French and, later on, by the Israelis. Their intention was, obviously, not to tell the Palestinian story, nor pay attention to the Palestinians or the country of Palestine—because most of these films outright ignore that. They’d focus on the fact that this was “the land of the Bible” and all that, and would film accordingly.
That’s why it’s the camera of the dispossessed: it’s everything that I find that I could reclaim and reuse in a way that serves a narrative that was totally ignored, a counter-narrative that did not exist and was not the intention of the original films or materials. It was also the way I approached the materials in Unusual Summer (2020) and the way I’m approaching it now with this Gaza tape. Even if I shoot a fiction film, it’s still going to be the camera of the dispossessed. It becomes something which can be found in everything you do, in the way you film, in the way you choose your subject. But fundamentally, it comes from the fact that I cannot shoot there. I cannot go to places that don’t exist anymore. It’s not like I’m going to make an epic Hollywood film to re-create the city, but I go back and find what they filmed and what these people did to the place.
Filmmaker: I’d like to ask you more about the interventions in A Fidai Film. Given the dispositif of the camera of the dispossed, how did you approach the modifications of the material—both yours, and the ones that were performed onto the footage after it was looted? I’m thinking of this very powerful shot where you color the deteriorations of a reel in red, rendering all of this violence visible. It’s not not just the intrinsic violence of how the image was created in the first place, but also the violence of how it was improperly stored, what that means in itself.

Aljafari: In general, I believe that using already existing footage does not mean that it should be used the way I found it. There is no historical value in it that prevents me from doing my interventions as a filmmaker. If I’m using something that already exists, I want to take it to another place. In Recollection, I removed the actors basically out of practicality; they were standing in my way. (laughs) I wanted to see the landscape and was just waiting all the time for them to leave the frame. And oftentimes they wouldn’t, because most of these films were shot in a very American style, meaning you never leave the frame “empty,” or if the actors do leave the frame, it’s just for a second. That’s why I sometimes ended up using stills, because I had to work a lot to remove the actors and recreate the space they were occupying. These kinds of limitations became the film itself.
When I was working on A Fidai Film, when I found all this almost completely destroyed material,  I thought that I should color it in red because, in a way, it can talk to us much better in showing the violence that happened to the places too. Because the image is not just an image. The way it looks is very violent because, for one, it is something stolen, and that becomes a metaphor for the country. Adding these elements was very meaningful for me to be able to express myself, even coloring people that I found in red so that I could pay more attention to them. It also gives you an uncomfortable feeling; it breaks all this nostalgia that people have about old footage. 
Even with the last scene, the one with the fire—which we added to the scene itself—it was a way in which we created new meaning. The dangerous thing about using already-existing material is that it has its own narrative, its own gaze and power. What I do is basically turn the image against itself. And so, the interventions were a necessary thing to do.
Filmmaker: I’d like to ask you more about the archive itself—of course, if you’re at freedom to disclose this kind of information, since it might be an issue that is quite sensitive with regards to your sources. How did you arrive to these materials?
Aljafari: There were many resources that I used. Some of [the footage] was in the hands of private people, of Israeli researchers—people who, for me, are the second looters of this material. They kept these materials in their homes and used them for their own academic career. They really gave me such a hard time when I tried to get hold of some of what they had. It’s a subject in itself. I can tell you stories about what I had to go through to get some of this material. Some of it was even given to me in very compressed files, because they didn’t want me to use it. For example, there was this woman who I went to see her at her house in Tel Aviv, and she had an entire archive of films, photographs, and materials. It’s something so violent to see and to comprehend, in a way. You realize that even these people, who use this material to criticize the state or the army’s practices, are continuing the same tradition. They are the second looters – once again, it’s exactly a metaphor for being a settler. (laughs) They’re not able to free themselves: they continue the same things, just differently. Other materials I found online. During the pandemic, many Israeli archives decided to make online portals, and you could go through materials. They tried to protect it from piracy, but I found a way to capture it and create my own archive,. That’s why I ended up making three films during this time: the two shorts [Paradiso, XXI, 108 and UNDR] and A Fidai Film. I collected a lot of things.
Filmmaker: I know this might be a very sensitive question, but what do you think about the images that are being created nowadays, in Gaza and the Occupied Territories? Can they constitute a future archive? Would you say that they have marked a change in how people all over the world look at these kind of images, and at Palestine? At the same time, there are also some caveats: some ethical problems towards how one ends up seeing suffering and becomes desensitized to it. Still, more people than ever are seeing images of Palestine, shot by Palestinians.
Aljafari: We see it happening live. Of course, there are people that are affected and moved. I don’t know what role cinema can play in giving a new life to these images, one day. Cinema, in general, needs time to look at things properly, and not just as news. But it’s clear that the process of dehumanization that happened to the Palestinians, specifically, allows this to happen—that people in power are not affected by these images. It doesn’t mean anything to them. The people are just numbers.

This really makes us believe that an image has no meaning outside of the context and our humanity. It does make a difference when you see images of people in Gaza or Israelis. The image itself, in that sense, is meaningless. It is really what you believe, what you feel already about people, about places.
Filmmaker: A Fidai Film has traveled a lot in the past year. It’s impressive. A lot of people working in festivals or cinemas feel an urgency to show the film. How do you relate to the film’s trajectory, to the attention it has garnered from the audience and from critics? Conversely, there have also been places that have refused to show the film. Do you think that people are people approaching the film properly?
Aljafari: In general, my answer is yes. I think what happened last year is that people developed a sensibility that wasn’t there before. It made it easier for a film like mine to be accessible, even if the film is sometimes very abstract and doesn’t give you clear indications of where we are and who these people are exactly. You just watch. The idea was to work on a different level—not with the emotions of people, or my emotions, which I’m also trying to express. I hope that they will be able to reach people, but I think the sensibility people developed over the last year helped the film a lot. Tragically, the situation we are in helped the film to be shown more. But I think the only place where the film is not being screened is, in fact, Germany. Of course, some countries embrace the film much more than others.
Filmmaker: Can one dream of a Palestinian cinema beyond occupation?
Aljafari: Right now it’s difficult to imagine, because we are in the middle of a real struggle for existence. It’s a very horrifying and dangerous moment because it looks like the Israeli state will continue doing what they’re doing because nobody’s going to stop them in the near future. So, we are almost in a 19th-century style of colonialism, but I think it’s more like a 16th-century style of colonialism, in a way.