We are thrilled to present the Irish premiere of Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film; a reclamation of the archive collection of photos and film from the Palestine Research Center in Beirut seized by the IDF in 1982.

Investigating the looting of Palestinian films which took place in Beirut in 1982, the film uses this event as a premise in order to make visible materials hidden in Israeli archives, and proposes a counter-narrative of a continuous history of appropriation.

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, ‘A Fidai Film’ aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques. (Doha Film Institute)

The opening of the festival will be marked by opening words from aemi Board Member Maeve Connolly. Maeve Connolly is a writer and researcher based in Dublin, where she teaches on the BA in Art at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. 

FILM INFO:
A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari, 2024, 78 minutes, Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brasil, France

‘The film is a treasure trove of footage about Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, accompanied by a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by writers including Gassan Kanafani. Each image and montage embody history and art, longing and sadness and resistance and sabotage.’ (IDFA 2024)

This screening and the decision to open the festival with this stunning work of film artistry is in expression of aemi’s ongoing solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist. His films have screened at major festivals and museums, including Locarno, London, Viennale, and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo. He has received prestigious awards from FIDMarseille, Pesaro, and Visions du Réel. In 2024, IndieLisboa hosted a full retrospective of his work. Aljafari has taught at The New School and DFFB in Berlin and was a Film Study Center fellow at Harvard. Currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he is developing “Beirut 1931,” a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

This is not a film about the past, but about the future that is still possible to define. I am sabotaging the colonial gaze. It is a work that can only begin with putting a mirror in front of colonial archives. What can we see, feel and perhaps comprehend from archival materials found in Israeli institutions, which tirelessly documented everything possible in this country turned into broken pieces year after year? This counter-archive is what I call “the camera of the dispossessed.” Kamal Aljafari