On November 1 and 2, 2001, then-28-year-old Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari visited Gaza, and left with about two hours and forty minutes worth of MiniDV footage that remained packed away for decades. Last year, Aljafari unearthed this footage, and did not even immediately recognize that he shot it: “I recognized Gaza,” Aljafari recalled in an interview, “but I still didn’t know what the material was, until I’d seen myself in this footage in a scene where I’m handing the camera to a guide named Hasan and asking him if he can film me.” While he still did not remember recording almost any of the footage, he did eventually recall that he had visited Gaza to track down a friend he briefly knew when serving a sentence in an Israeli prison as a teenager, and that he stayed with local guide Hasan Elboubou.
Struck by the rediscovered footage of this brief visit, Aljafari collated it into a documentary film with very few alterations. Aljafari noted that he removed about an hour’s worth of footage from the final cut, and he also added some music and occasional on-screen intertitles, but otherwise, he did not edit the recordings or the order they appear in. What remains is a haunting document of a city that has now been decimated by Israel’s well-documented, genocidal military campaign.
The footage, washed-out, shaky, and sometimes wavering in focus, is diligently chronological, in keeping with Aljafari’s decision to maintain the order it was recorded in. This being the case, the viewer enters Gaza with Aljafari and is guided through it by Hasan, who points out locations and landmarks as a driver escorts them through the city. The footage Aljafari captured over the next two days, some of which was recorded by Hasan, provides a window into life in Gaza at this particular point in time. The Second Intifada was underway, marring each day and night with violence and placing the local economy under enormous strain, and Israel was actively seizing land to construct settlements.
Throughout the footage, Gazans express conflicting opinions about being filmed. When Aljafari encounters people whose home was demolished to make way for settlements, they are wary, as they believe the footage becoming public would jeopardize their ability to work in Israel and may put their safety at risk. Others he speaks to are insistent that he film the effects of Israeli shelling on their homes — broken windows, shrapnel on the floor — while, at the same time, excited children ask him to film them and pose for the camera. Aljafari’s visual documentation of a city that had been occupied for decades, that was and continues to be so cut off from the rest of the world that it is commonly called “the world’s largest open-air prison,” is a matter of urgency and high stakes for the Gazans captured on camera. One woman makes a blistering assessment of her life, under Israeli shelling and the constant threat of displacement, to the camera: “My life? This is not a life!”
Though Aljafari did make aesthetic decisions in preparing this footage as a film, to make qualitative judgments on the aesthetic qualities of With Hasan in Gaza would be beside the point. With 24 years of hindsight, Aljafari’s presentation of this footage takes on an elegiac aspect — the society he documented, which was already under siege, has largely been obliterated. When children smile at the camera, one cannot avoid the wrenching question of whether they are still alive. For his part, Aljafari has shared that he did not locate his friend, and that today, he does not know whether Hasan himself is alive. A sober presentation of a nearly forgotten archive that briefly vivifies what has been irretrievably lost, With Hasan in Gaza is a vital and mournful work of preservation.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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