EN
"I went in Gaza twenty-four years ago. This is my first film, which I have never made. I recently found three MiniDV tapes that I shot in Gaza in the year 2000. This discovery reminded me of a trip I took to Gaza to search for a former prison mate I had met in 1989. I couldn’t find him. It was the first time I had watched this footage, forgotten for twenty-four years, which has now become a document of a life and a place that no longer exist. On this journey, I found myself documenting life in the Gaza Strip. With Hasan in Gaza is a road trip across Gaza, from north to south, accompanied by Hasan, the man who hosted me.”
Kamal Aljafari
“What can an image do? Today, when photographs and videos of famine and slaughter speed across networks and yet have seemingly no impact in slowing, let alone halting, the violence against Palestinians, it can be easy to lose faith in the power of images. Already in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag acknowledged that ‘Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.’ A film will not stop a genocide. But images can be, as Aljafari affirms with this documentary, a form of memory addressed to the future. With Hasan in Gaza departs sharply from the repertoire of humanitarian journalism and its present-tense immediacy, offering a different relationship to duration, historicity and attention. As Dork Zabunyan has suggested, images of struggle are never exhausted in the moment of their production, for they are ‘also addressed to other individuals who might become the bearers of the torch of revolt at a later as yet unspecified date’. One can stare at the aerial photograph of Gaza, a distanced and dead picture. But one might better turn to the vital anachronism of With Hasan in Gaza and be reminded: history is long and Palestine must be free.”
Erika Balsom
