Kamal Aljafari, “the camera of the dispossessed” which documents Palestine [Interview]

After “Paradiso, XXXI, 108” in 2022, Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari extends his archival work, in his new cinematographic opus “A Fidai Film”. The outcome of this work reflects its author’s determination to bring together the visual memory of his country, through a careful collection of archives from the 1920s to the 1980s, initially stolen by the Israeli army from the Palestine Research Center, in Beirut (Lebanon), during the 1982 war.

Presenting his documentary during the 21st edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM 2024), the filmmaker advocates what he calls “the camera of the dispossessed” as a means of expression for those whose land is confiscated. In this way, the audiovisual fresco becomes a stone in the building of the counter-archive, which allows Kamal Aljafari to reappropriate a looted heritage.

During this 21st FIFM, you presented your documentary “Fidai Film”. In 1982, Palestinian archives were looted during the Israeli invasion of Beirut. How were you able to access these documents to start your film from lost and stolen footage?

The film uses these events, which took place in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Beirut and the looting of the Palestinian Research Center, as a starting point to tell the Palestinian condition through historical images. For many years this material was hidden in Israeli archives, then different people gained access to it. It was therefore dispersed and I had to contact many people to find traces of it.

Even today, we are witnessing a war of images with the war which continues in Palestine. Do you think that they will be documented for the use of future filmmakers, to ensure the continuity of the archival work in which filmmakers like you are engaged?

Of course the condition we live in will be the main subject of many films, so in a way we cannot escape the continued documentation that future generations will provide of what is happening today. Again. I think that any film, even fictional ones made by Palestinian filmmakers, ends up truly documenting our situation.

We notice a continuity between your previous film, “Paradiso, XXXI, 108” and “Fida’i Film”. Can you tell us more?

Yes, because in recent years, I have mainly worked with found images, archive images. I think through visual archive work we can study patterns, connecting events in the past with what could possibly happen in the future. I devote a lot of my creation to existing images and their weight on History.

You have also worked on Palestinian fiction films and you have documented them in the form of archives. This work of memory, on the memory of Palestine, means for you the fact of capturing real visuals and fictionalized Palestinian creations to preserve your entire pictorial heritage?

I think that the work of cinema, the origins of cinema and photography, are all linked to memory. It is a human need to document every moment so that history remembers it, to capture it and make it stay forever. In this sense, the archives are for me really crucial in the way I want to express myself. Even when making a fiction film, I find it necessary to add images from the past and archive images.

Having grown up in Ramla, how did this journey of life under Israeli occupation lead you to cinema, documentaries and visual archives?

It is precisely because I come from Ramla that I ended up doing what I do today, because of the condition in which we live. It is a reflection and an expression on being in your own country, while feeling almost like the foreigner who has never lived there and who has just arrived there. It was really the situation of being under occupation that led me to make films like I make them today.

This is also why I call this kind of work “the camera of the dispossessed”, in the sense that it is about bringing together and collecting what is possible to be, from someone’s point of view. one who lost everything.

Many Palestinian filmmakers work on archives. Some are among the directors supported by the Ateliers de l’Atlas, as part of the FIFM, such as Lina Soualem, awarded for her documentary “Bye Bye Tibériade”. What do you think of the presence of Palestinian cinema in international festivals, as a means of continuing to highlight the Palestinian question?

The mobilization of Palestinian filmmakers so that their works are visible throughout the world, particularly in international film festivals, is absolutely important. In Morocco in general and at the FIFM in particular, the presence of Palestinian films is still there. I think this is something essential, especially because we do not have a free country. Meetings like the FIFM therefore provide this necessary and vital space for Palestinian voices.