A Fidai Film (2024)
Kamal Aljafari
A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, digital, 78 min, 2024
In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, A Fidai Film aims to create a counternarrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It is a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.—Doha Film Institute
Aljafari has also documented not just the evidence of his stolen homeland, but also a new way of filming, a whole new kind of cinema: the cinema of the negatives. He gets the same negatives and reverses their light and shadows, as it were. What the Israelis have highlighted, he darkens, and what they have shoved into the background, he brings to the foreground; and thus, where they show, he sabotages, and where they hide, he exposes.—Hamid Dabashi
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with The River and the Land and Prismatic Ground.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy of the artist © Kamal Aljafari.
About the artist
Kamal Aljafari (Palestine) is a filmmaker and artist born in Ramla in 1972. His work is largely affiliated with the world of documentary, although he employs a variety of different procedures and formats that position the visual arts in dialogue with the essay film and experimental cinema. One of the hallmarks of his process lies in the manipulation of images in an attempt to extrapolate their figurative nature, as in his treatment of domestic surveillance footage. Aljafari received an MFA from Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2003). His films have screened at festivals and museums worldwide, including Fondazione Prada, Sharjah Film Platform, Locarno Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Nuova Orfeo, Curtas Vila do Conde, London Film Festival, Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EXiS, Viennale, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo. He is the recipient of major awards from FIDMarseille, Pesaro Film Festival, and Visions du Réel, among others. A full retrospective of his work to date was held at IndieLisboa in 2024. Writing about his films has appeared in Variety, cineuropa, Middle East Eye, Off Screen, and elsewhere. Aljafari has taught at The New School and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. He has received a fellowship from the Film Study Center-Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University (2024–2025). He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.