With Hasan in Gaza

Directed by Kamal Aljafari | 106 minutes | 15+ | Australian Premiere |

6:20pm Sunday, 17 May | Balam Balam Place - Cinema 2 | Buy Tickets | Buy Passes

Gaza, 2001: Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari (<i>A Fidai Film</i>) searches for a man he met while briefly imprisoned as a teenager.

Three MiniDV tapes of life in Gaza from 2001 were recently rediscovered. This footage is now a testament to a place and time that no longer exists. What started as a search for a former prison mate from 1989—a man lost to time and war— led to 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 transforms this forgotten footage into a cinematic reflection on memory, loss and the passage of time, capturing a Gaza of the past and lives that may never be found again.

“An homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and that came back to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence, or non-existence. It is a film about the catastrophe, and the poetry that resists. This is my first film, which I have never made.” Director Kamal Aljafari

SIMILAR: A Fidai Film, No Other Land, Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image

"A sober presentation of a nearly forgotten archive that briefly vivifies what has been irretrievably lost, <i>With Hasan in Gaza</i> is a vital and mournful work of preservation." - Robert Stinner, InReview Online

“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. It is hard to be sure of the fate of any of the people filmed in the documentary, but Aljafari ensures they won’t be forgotten.” - Arron Kennon, Sight and Sound

Country: Palestine
Year: 2026
Language: Arabic