Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari, known for his meditative and archival-rooted works like A Fidai Film and Recollection, is set to premiere his latest documentary With Hasan in Gaza at the 78th Locarno Film Festival on 7 August. Ahead of its competition debut, the first trailer has been released exclusively by The Hollywood Reporter, offering a deeply evocative preview of a project rooted in memory and the enduring scars of absence.
The film unfolds from a chance rediscovery: three MiniDV tapes recorded in Gaza in 2001, long buried, recently resurfaced. What begins as a search for a friend imprisoned in 1989 transforms into an intimate road journey down Gaza’s fractured spine, led by a local guide named Hasan—whose whereabouts today remain a mystery.
Watch the trailer here:
Aljafari describes his film as “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.” The result is, in his words, “a film about the catastrophe, and the poetry that resists.”
The trailer offers fleeting yet potent glimpses—children facing the camera with unguarded curiosity, landscapes passing from a moving car, moments that feel suspended in time. These are images that speak not only of place but of what has been lost to siege, silence, and dislocation.
The film is produced by Aljafari himself under Kamal Aljafari Productions, with backing from a coalition of international supporters including the Doha Film Institute, CNAP – Image/mouvement, the Gwaertler Stiftung, Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship, and Atelier 105 – Light Cone.
Reflecting on the origins of the film, the director shares, “I went to Gaza 24 years ago searching for a friend, without an address. This is my first film, which I have never made.” With its blend of ghostly rediscovery and lyrical resistance, With Hasan in Gaza emerges as a portrait not only of a place but of time itself—disjointed, reclaimed, and reframed through cinema.
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