The Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari considers all of his works as an archive. Aljafari’s cinema blurs and immaterializes reality by non-traditional techniques in order to reconstruct his home country Palestine. He describes his work as “the camera of the dispossessed.” Aljafari's films have been shown at major film festivals all over the world, such as Berlinale, Locarno, Viennale and Rotterdam.

In his newest film, Aljafari makes use of footage that the Israeli army looted in Beirut in the summer of 1982. The archival footage becomes distorted through experimentation with editing and overlays. By rendering parts of the visuals invisible, Aljafari interrogates the power dynamics between those behind the camera and those captured by it.

The imagery shows landscapes, people, streets, industry, but also war, fire, soldiers, destruction. By manipulating these images, Aljafari reclaims them, transforming them into visual memories. This process of retroactive meaning-making simultaneously opens up space for a reimagined and more clearly defined future. It leads to an essay film that is equally about presence as it is about absence. With the Palestinian people deprived of their own footage, a counter-narrative has to find room in the narrow space in between this historical loss and ongoing resistance.

A Fidai Film is part of a larger block on investigating images of violence against Palestinians.