A Fidai Film

Kamal Aljafari / Germany / 2024 / Czech Premiere / 78 min.

synopsis

In the summer of 1982, during the intervention in Lebanon, the Israeli army left behind three thousand dead and seized the archives of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut. The Ministry of Defence misused the vast collection of Palestinian books, photographs and films for propaganda purposes. Palestinian Aljafari reclaims the appropriated images and, through cinematic sabotage, removes them from their forced ideological context. He crosses out in red the commentaries and figures of the winners; he poetically colours, associatively connects and adamantly condemns. His collage, which has the Arabic word fidai in its title, meaning to sacrifice for the good of the whole, is an act of political defiance and artistic liberation.

“Aljafari has described his approach as the ‘camera of the dispossessed’ by recovering lost images and memories of life in Palestine. The documentary has decontextualized pre-existing material as a form of artistic and political liberation.”

Quote source: POV Magazine

biography

Kamal Aljafari (1972) is a Palestinian filmmaker and educator who lives in Berlin. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where he made Visit Iraq (2003). This was followed by Balconies (2007), Port of Memory (2010), Recollection (2015), An Unusual Summer (2020) and UNDR (2024). His work combines documentary, fiction and experimental film and focuses on the Jaffa region of Israel, where he is currently shooting his feature debut Beirut 1931.