“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.”

Kamal Aljafari

Constructed from three MiniDV tapes shot in Gaza in 2001 and rediscovered years later, Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Kamal Aljafari’s film transforms recovered footage into a profound cinematic meditation on memory, loss, and the passage of time. Originally conceived as a search for a former prison mate from 1989, the film unfolds into 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 throws mainstream images of a people displaced into relief through the traces of absence that bygone time evokes. —Cinema Guild

In Arabic with English subtitles

“With Hasan in Gaza possesses a tremendous and at times unbearable force … The film exists across a chasm, torn between the moment in which the images were captured and the moment in which they are being presented, throwing into painful relief the relation to time and finitude at stake in all photographic images.”

Erika Balsom, New Left Review

“Much of With Hasan​’s pathos lies in our anachronistic encounter with Gaza’s once-vibrant streets and souks … But the rubble, subjugation, and poverty wrought by Israeli occupation are here too … Rarely in cinema is Gaza granted the care of close, tender observation that seeks to know the place from the perspective of a neighbour and friend rather than a journalist or emergency worker.”

Kareem Estefan, Film Comment
Media