With Hasan in Gaza

a film by Kamal Aljafari
2025, 112 minutes

Poster

Synopsis

Constructed from three MiniDV tapes shot in Gaza in 2001 and rediscovered years later, the film transforms recovered footage into a profound cinematic meditation on memory, loss, and the passage of time.

Originally conceived as a search for a former prison mate from 1989, the film unfolds into an unexpected road trip from the north to the south of Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. As the camera moves through Gaza’s streets and landscapes, it records fleeting moments of everyday life—fragments of a reality now irreversibly altered. With Hasan in Gaza throws mainstream images of a people displaced into relief through the traces of absence bygone time evokes.

Reviews

“With this crux – to film, or not to film – With Hasan in Gaza brilliantly centres the need to bear witness as no less than a matter of life and death, preservation and loss, liberation and occupation.”
- Arron Kennon, Sight and Sound

"Against all these crimes of extermination, every second of this documentary is an archive of presence, demanding recognition and remembrance." - Erika Balsom, New Left Review

Press Materials

High Resolution Stills and Press Kit
Press Release

Where to watch

In Theaters