'With Hassan in Gaza', recently screened at the 14th Athens Innovative Film Festival, is nominated in two categories at the European Film Awards in Berlin on Saturday. Its director Kamal Aljafari tells Euronews Culture the documentary is "an act of resistance against the erasure of memory".
In 2001, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari travelled to Gaza in search of a former prisoner in Israeli jails from 1989, with whom he had lost contact over the years.
Together with Hassan, a local guide, he set off from the north and ended up in the south of Gaza, crossing towns, streets and landscapes and meeting locals in the market and by the sea.
Aljafari recorded this journey with his camera, the moments of daily life of the Palestinians living in the area and their conversations, with no intention at the time of making a film. He never managed, however, to find his friend.
He returned back to his university studies in Cologne and never watched the content he had recorded. Everything he shot in 2001 was contained on three MiniDV tapes, which the director accidentally discovered last July, having forgotten they existed.
So he decided to make the documentary "With Hassan in Gaza". As he says:"This is my first film that I didn't make". His efforts transform the old footage into a poetic exploration of memory, loss and time, offering a valuable testimony of a bygone era and a place that no longer exists.
Euronews Culture spoke with the Palestinian director at the Greek Film Archive,in the framework of the 14th Innovative Film Festival.
EC: What does your this film mean to you. Tell us about its significance?
"For me, the discovery of the cassettes, these three cassettes, was almost like a sign of life, against extinction. And when I started watching them, I was very moved by everything I saw, because the footage that was shot back then, in 2001, in order to find a friend, is now becoming a film about finding all these people who appear in the footage, all these faces and all these places that, in fact, no longer exist today. So it became essentially a testimony to everything we see there.
That's why I couldn't remove anything from the footage I shot at the time. So I decided to keep everything as it was recorded. I believe that film has a key role in preserving memory and in preserving life that no longer exists. Gaza has been completely destroyed and many people have been killed.
So this material has a special significance beyond the usual, because everything you see as a viewer makes you think and wonder what happened to these people you see in the film, what happened to this place. In this case, film really has a very strong connection to memory, to preserving memory and keeping the place and the people who appear alive, despite what happens there.
I have to admit that I'm afraid to ask what happened to these people we see in the film. I want them to be alive. I want them to continue to exist forever. So, through these images of life in Gaza, even though it was occupied, I show that people were alive, they existed. Showing what it was like then, without showing anything of the current situation, is an act of resistance against the erasure of memory, against the occupation_."_
The moving road movie offers an unfiltered insight into real life in Gaza in 2001 and the enormous difficulties faced by its inhabitants during the second intifada, amid Israeli bombardment and settler violence. As well as being a testimony of the struggle of the people, it's also a revealing portrait of the beauty of the land.
"What is really very telling about the footage that was already shot in 2001, 24 years ago, is the situation of the people. Gaza was already then an open prison, where people had no freedom of movement and lived under occupation. And you can see that the roots of the violence, which has actually worsened over the years and, of course, in the last two years, are in the situation of people living under occupation and not free. I think when I made the trip, I was very moved by everything I saw there, because I don't live in Gaza, I've never been there before, I've never been there again.
So for me this trip was actually a trip that helped me to see the situation, even me being a Palestinian. You could see that the life of the people there is not really a normal life. And that phrase comes up again and again in the film from people who tell you that this is not a life. So imagine that this was already happening 24 years ago, and today we are basically facing a total catastrophe. The current war has destroyed any possibility of life there, as there are no schools, no homes for people, no hospitals. So whatever happened there makes people just want to leave. That was the aim of the recent war in Gaza."
Following the recent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, is there any prospect of change in the situation in the region?
"It is very difficult to talk about hope in the situation we are in today because there is no real international pressure on Israel not only to allow the people of Gaza to rebuild their lives, which is really broken in every sense of the word, but also to have a prospect for the people of Palestine and the people of Gaza to have self-determination, which will allow them to have their own country. That is the only hope.
Despite all the crimes against humanity committed against the people of Gaza, there are no real consequences at the political level by the governments. There's a lot of solidarity between people everywhere I travel, everywhere I go to show this film, but I think that hasn't, hasn't had, hasn't led to change, actually, at the level of governments."
Kamal Aljafari splits his time between Berlin and Paris. He has made a total of 12 short and feature documentaries.
'With Hassan in Gaza' won the Special Jury Prize at the 14th Athens Innovative Film Festival.
The film also received the Europa Cinemas Label Award at the Locarno Film Festival, where it had its world premiere in August.
The film is also among the nominees for the Best European Documentary and Best European Film of the Year categories at the 38th European Film Awards in Berlin on 17 January.
