IDFA: A Fidai Film - Kamal Aljfari

Camera of the dispossessed

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded southern Lebanon and advanced to West Beirut, where the large collection of photographs, films and documents that had been assembled by the Palestinian Research Center since 1965 was located. The archive was taken as war booty. Using this history as a starting point, Kamal Aljfari constructs a revitalized Palestinian visual memory, a kind of counter-archive that he calls the 'camera of the dispossessed'.

A Fidai Film is a mixture of found footage and experimental film. Parts of the image have been cut out or replaced with material from the background. Title texts have been scratched out with red spots. The film contains a wealth of moving images about Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, with a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by, among others, writer Gassan Kanafani. History and art, desire and sorrow, resistance and sabotage come together in every montage and in every image.

Please note: the times are an indication.