In 2001, filmmaker Kamal Aljafari traveled through Gaza looking for a man he had known briefly as a teenager in Israeli detention. Accompanied by local guide Hasan Elboubou, Aljfari documented his journey from north to south on three MiniDV tapes. The found footage from that trip, rediscovered only recently, captures a place and people now lost to time and war: an involuntary archive of ordinary life under siege during the Second Intifada.
A poignant record of Gaza from the early 2000s, Aljafari lets his handheld camera wander through the city’s streets, homes, and markets with haunting urgency. The raw, intimate footage captures life under siege with documentary immediacy, transforming a personal search into an unbearable question about survival and erasure.
“... a hauntingly poignant visual journey through Gaza as it existed in 2001.”
Ed Meza Variety 06/08/2025
Europa Cinemas Label, Locarno Film Festival 2025, 2025, ch
Toronto - TIFF 2025, 2025, ca
New York FF 2025, 2025, us
Vancouver International Film Festival 2025, 2025, ca
Ulysses Award for Best Documentary, Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, 2025, fr
Kamal ALJAFARI
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist known for experimental documentary cinema. A graduate of Cologne’s Academy of Media Arts, Aljafari has held teaching positions at The New School in New York and Berlin’s Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie. His practice has been supported by numerous fellowships, including Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute (2009-2010) and Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2024-25). His feature-length documentary, A Fidai Film (2024), screened at major festivals worldwide and garnered fifteen international awards.
