The new documentary With Hasan in Gaza––a poignant, meditative portrait of a city now fighting for its life––works as both a travelogue and time machine. In 2001, the filmmaker Kamal Aljafari journeyed to Palestine in the hopes of finding Adder Rahim, a friend he made while serving seven months in the juvenile section of Israel’s Naqab Desert prison when he was 17 years old. During filming, Aljafari met Hasan, a guide who agreed to drive him the length of the country, down its coastal strip, during which time the director documented what he saw: children playing, rows of cars and buildings, bustling city streets.
These images are collected here as arecollection and document, a work that echoes the best travelogue films in its admirable restraint and transportive powers (Chantal Akerman’s From the East, as always, comes to mind) while carrying the significance of evidence. Hasan offers some of the most vital images I’ve seen recently of a time when our current reality was still relatively inconceivable. Aljafari’s movie is also a poem about memory, coming about serendipitously when he found three MiniDV tapes in his archives––footage he had either thought lost or had largely forgotten. Aljafari eventually covered the story of his imprisonment in his 2006 film The Roof. For Hasan in Gaza, he repurposes the footage as a kind of found art.
One of Aljafari’s most affecting choices is to present the footage with no additional material. There is no mention of the current situation in Gaza nor the tens of thousands who have been slaughtered by the Israeli military in the last two years, but those lives of course linger just outside the frame. Instead, via onscreen text, the director offers recollections of his time in prison––the taste of bread and sugar, watching the Berlin wall fall on TV, the Red Cross worker who gave him a cigarette and book by Franz Fanon. These thoughts play over familiar scenes of daily life: men playing cards and watching basketball, bakers preparing flatbread, busy street traders. In-between, whether witnessing mortar fire or conversing with locals––some of whom are eager to tell their story, some of whom are more anxious about the idea––Aljafari’s film confronts the Israeli aggression of an earlier time.
To call With Hasan in Gaza a personal work would be an understatement, but its message is as clear as it is universal. At time of writing, the film is set to play at 35 international festivals in the coming months; we can only hope there’s still time for it not to be a eulogy. Aljafari’s one direct flourish to suggest the political present comes through Simon Fisher Turner’s score, which blends nostalgic Persian pop music with atonal sounds that only occasionally skew towards the ominous. The composer is best-known for his work on Derek Jarman’s Carravagio and Blue, but I couldn’t help noting echoes of Mica Levi’s jagged work on The Zone of Interest here—and similar to Glazer’s, this is a film that says what needs to be said by saying nothing at all.
With Hasan in Gaza screened at TIFF 2025.
The post TIFF Review: With Hasan in Gaza Confronts Israeli Aggression with Grace and Memory first appeared on The Film Stage.
