A Fidai Film

In the summer of 1982 the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon. They advanced as far as West Beirut, which had been home to the Palestine Research Center and its vast collection of photographs, films, and documents since 1965. The Israeli army seized the archive as war booty.

This history forms the departure point for Kamal Aljafari’s reconstruction of a revitalized Palestinian visual record, a sort of counter-archive that he calls “the camera of the dispossessed.” A Fidai Film is a blend of found footage and experimental cinema, with parts of the image cut out or replaced with material from the background, and title texts scratched out with red marks.

The film is a treasure trove of footage about Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, accompanied by a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by writers including Gassan Kanafani. Each image and montage embodies history and art, longing and sadness and resistance and sabotage.