With Hasan in Gaza
مع حسن في غزة- PALESTINE, GERMANY, FRANCE, QATAR / 2025 / Arabic / Color / DCP / 106 min
Director, Script, Photography, Editing, Sound: Kamal Aljafari
Editing Assistant: Martin Arbelaez
Music: Simon Fisher Turner, Attila Faravelli
Sound Mixing: Jochen Jezussek
Color Grading & Compositing: Yannig Willmann
Editing Consultant: Benjamin Mirguet
Additional Music: Lucy Railton
Graphics: Chiara Alexandra Young, Francesco Bellagamba
Executive Producer: Flavia Mazzarino
Supported by: Doha Film Institute, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Gwaertler Stiftung, Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship, Atelier 105 – Light Cone
Production Company: Kamal Aljafari Productions
Source: Kamal Aljafari Productions, Flavia Mazzarino
One day, the filmmaker found an old videotape. When he played it, he saw footage of himself traveling through Gaza. Guided by the label on the tape—“Hasan, Gaza, 2001”—he retraced his memories and recalled that the journey had been to search for a former cellmate from his youth, someone he had shared a prison cell with after being unjustly incarcerated. Memories of that 1989 imprisonment and of Gaza in 2001, tracing back to the two intifadas, intertwine with the present-day reality of Gaza. This sparks a new journey of reflection, confronting a pain that refuses to end. A meditative exploration to question injustice and resist historical erasure. (KH)
[Director’s Statement] An homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and that came back to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence, or non-existence. It is a film about the catastrophe, and the poetry that resists.
This is my first film, which I have never made.
Kamal AljafariPalestinian filmmaker and artist. His films have screened at major festivals and museums, including the Locarno International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, and the Bienal de São Paulo. He has received prestigious awards from FIDMarseille, the Pesaro International Film Festival, and Visions du Réel. In 2024, IndieLisboa hosted a full retrospective of his work. Aljafari has taught at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin and was a Film Study Center fellow at Harvard University. Currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he is developing Beirut 1931, a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.