At Fidai Film. Meeting with director Kamal Aljafari

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Burning Lights competition of Visions du Réel, the most experimental section of the Swiss festival, At Fidai Film is the latest work by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari. An author accustomed to exploring the narrative boundaries of cinema by intertwining fiction and non-fiction, documentary and video art, working on archives and found footage to unleash the subversive power inherent in images.

During the military intervention in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, the IDF (Israel Defense Force) looted and devastated the archive of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut. The archive contained more than 25,000 historical documents about Palestine, including a collection of images and films that made up the largest collection of Palestinian history in the world. The entire visual memory of the country thus became a spoil of war, renamed partly for ideological reasons. In At Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari recovers these long-lost images by creating a counter-narrative in the form of cinematic sabotage, capable of restoring a different vision of a people who have been doubly plundered, both of their land and their history. Below is the report of the meeting with Aljafari.

How did the idea for this film come about?

At Fidai Film it is a work that talks about a people who have lost everything and no longer have a land. These images come from an Israeli archive that I managed to access a few years ago. This is mostly damaged material on VHS, a format I have worked with often in recent years. The first idea was to create a counter-narrative with a sabotage film of the plundered image. Trust me [singolare di Fedayyin] is the term used to call the Palestinian partisans who carried out sabotage actions against Israeli settlers. So I decided to make a Fidai film.

Through the images of the archive, an ideal path of the Palestinian people is reconstructed, before and after the Nakba of 1948. How did you work from this point of view?

Everything that can be heard in this film has been reconstructed or recovered, while the visual aspect required a practice of reinterpretation. The main work on the material was to find meaning in these images so different and distant from each other, it was like a mission, but with great effort we managed to find what we were looking for. In my opinion the best thing is always to start from the beginning, in this case the beginning of history is the choice of some great nations of the world to promise Palestine to other people. We are talking about one of the oldest nations ever with cities with a glorious past like Jerusalem. But it would be absolutely wrong to identify that date as the beginning of the violent occupation of the Palestinian territory, just remember how in 1936 the British killed more than 20 thousand Palestinians due to the revolt against the PEEL partition plan. In that period, 50,000 Palestinians were interned and many of their homes demolished or burned. After 1948 the persecution also continued in other territories where Palestinians took refuge, such as Lebanon and the West Bank. This film was conceived long before October 7, 2023 but the conflict remains the same as well as the method, but the search for a final solution by the Israeli leaders is perceived. At Fidai Film it is the story of a nation that has fought against colonialism for more than a century.

Among the numerous images present in the film there are processions, riots, but also scenes of apparent daily life. How did you juggle this large amount of material?

This material was cataloged for the Israeli army and for anyone who wanted to dig up information on the past of the Palestinian people. They decided to label the images in a very curious way, practically describing the action but avoiding telling the context and the specific situation. The mind of a bureaucrat works in a very strange way. These images in the archive were shot by Palestinian filmmakers who recounted their daily lives as a means of expressing themselves as well as documenting the occupation. My commitment was to restore meaning to their work, to elaborate the image to reclaim our history in a certain way.

How did you work on the sound and songs?

The videos I had were often without sound or at least with ruined sound. From my point of view, creating sound for something that has none is like giving a voice to someone who has none and has never had one. The sound had to represent the continuous violence that is perceived when talking about colonialism. During the process I found elements that became very important, such as some songs. One of these came from an Israeli propaganda film made to talk about the Palestinian community that remained in Israel after 1948, clearly represented in a completely false and biased way. That song chosen for that video had the opposite effect, it sabotaged from within the message that the settlers wanted to send, so I decided to choose it for my film too.

With this film you managed to open a window onto a land that many of us only know from images on the news. You have given us a more human and authentic vision of Palestine.

Sabotaging the colonialist process also means this to me. The archive images were stolen by the Israelis precisely because their authenticity could damage the occupation. It is the heart of the cultural process of colonialism to hide and censor. For this reason, at first I myself, even though I was Palestinian, felt terrified and intimidated by those images.