(Check out Anders Ljung’s With Hasan in Gaza movie review, it is available now on VOD via Cinema Guild. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Kamal Aljafari’s documentary With Hasan in Gaza arrives not as an excavation of the past, but as a confrontation with the present through images long abandoned to time. Constructed from MiniDV footage shot in Gaza in 2001 and rediscovered decades later, the film carries an eerie temporal dissonance. Faces, streets, conversations, and laughter preserved on fragile digital tape now exist beneath the weight of hindsight, transforming ordinary documentation into something devastatingly prophetic. Premiering at Locarno, the documentary quickly became recognized not only for its political relevance but also for the quiet formal patience that distinguishes Aljafari’s filmmaking.
Aljafari, one of the most vital Palestinian filmmakers working today, has built a career around memory, erasure, and the reclaiming of image archives. Previous works such as A Fidai Film and An Unusual Summer demonstrate his fascination with how cinema can preserve spaces and identities threatened by disappearance. Rather than constructing conventional political documentaries driven by narration and explanation, Aljafari often allows environments and fragments of human behavior to speak for themselves. With Hasan in Gaza may be his most emotionally direct work yet, precisely because the footage predates the current global fixation on Gaza by more than two decades. The film reminds viewers that devastation is not sudden or new, but cyclical, inherited, and painfully normalized.
At its core, the documentary operates through a found-footage approach, though not in the traditional sense of manipulation or horror fiction. Instead, Aljafari repurposes his own footage as a recovered historical artifact. The aesthetic of grainy handheld MiniDV images creates an intimacy impossible to fabricate. Streets feel immediate, conversations feel accidental, and the camera’s wandering gaze often appears uncertain of what exactly it is searching for. Yet that uncertainty becomes the film’s emotional engine. Aljafari and Hasan move through Gaza with the looseness of travelers documenting everyday life, but the modern viewer watches knowing what lies ahead for these neighborhoods and people.
Though found footage is often associated with horror undertones, With Hasan in Gaza becomes more frightening than any fictionalized use of the style could achieve. Its terror emerges from realism. The film captures broken villages, damaged homes, unstable infrastructure, and communities already living in conditions of collapse, long before contemporary headlines forced many international audiences to pay attention. What unsettles most is not spectacle, but normalcy. Children continue playing in the streets. Teenagers joke with one another. Residents smile directly into the lens. Life persists naturally amidst surroundings that already carry the architecture of destruction.
The documentary’s greatest contrast lies within this collision between physical devastation and emotional endurance. Throughout the film, adolescence becomes a recurring symbol of resilience. Young people navigate cracked roads and fractured neighborhoods with an energy that resists the visual despair surrounding them. Their laughter does not erase the destruction; rather, it coexists with it in painful harmony. Aljafari’s camera lingers on these moments without sentimentality. He understands that documenting joy amid oppression is not an attempt to soften suffering, but proof of humanity refusing to disappear.
This contrast gives the documentary its haunting quality. The people on screen understand, perhaps more deeply than outside audiences, that the demolition surrounding them is not temporary. There is an unspoken awareness woven into daily life that instability will continue. Yet the film refuses to reduce Gaza’s residents into symbols of tragedy alone. Hasan himself becomes central to this idea. As both a guide and a presence in the film, he embodies warmth, humor, and patience, grounding the documentary in interpersonal connection rather than political abstraction.
Aljafari’s direction is remarkably restrained. He avoids excessive narration or explanatory framing, trusting the footage itself to communicate meaning. This patience becomes one of the film’s greatest strengths. Rather than overwhelming the audience with statistics or argumentation, the documentary quietly accumulates emotional force through observation. Small gestures, a conversation, a passing glance, a child acknowledging the camera, become devastating precisely because the audience recognizes the fragility of preservation. The footage now functions almost like a cinematic ghost, capturing spaces and people suspended between existence and disappearance.
In many ways, With Hasan in Gaza follows the structure of a traditional war documentary, documenting devastation and instability through on-the-ground footage. Yet what separates it from countless other films centered on conflict is its temporal perspective. Because the material originates from an earlier era, the documentary serves as an indictment of the world’s failure to understand how long this pain has persisted. The images do not simply document destruction; they document repetition. Watching the film today, viewers are confronted with the realization that much of what feels urgent and immediate in global discourse has, for Palestinians, existed as lived reality for generations.
That historical weight transforms With Hasan in Gaza into something larger than recovered footage. It becomes a meditation on memory itself, on who gets remembered, what survives politically, and how cinema can resist erasure. Aljafari turns aging digital footage into living testimony, crafting a documentary whose quiet humanity ultimately becomes more powerful than spectacle ever could.
– Anders Ljung
