A Fidai Film – cinema as an act of resistance
“I could no longer see. I lost my sight.” This attitude of blindness, motivated by an attack with a booby-trapped envelope, right in the initial caption, points to the need for testimony. But also memory. Something that appears packaged in the repetition of a children’s rhyme that precedes these words, as if asking the viewer to overcome this blindness.
The desire to rehabilitate the memory of his country, partially mutilated by the presence of the Israeli forces invading Beirut in 1982, is evident in Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film (2024). In fact, “fidai” takes on a lethal connotation, linked even to “fedayeen,” those warriors who redeem themselves through sacrifice. It has been a long time since I have seen a film dominated by such daring approach to cinema, treated like a genuine weapon, as an act of resistance. Based on art made from found footage, as if it were a true filmic bricolage, the film reminded me Godard’s last films (in particular The Image Book, 2018) – Godard himself being a great defender of the Palestinian cause. But there is also a charge of vital urgency that brings us close to the work of Sergei Paradjanov. A Fidai Film impressed us most in the regional competition of the 21st Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan.
In fact, A Fidai Film presents itself as a certain reckoning, a restitution of Palestinian national memories. It is motivated by the recovery of footage four decades after the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) seized a large part of the national archive of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) at the Palestine Research Center, at the time under the protection of the Lebanese government, following a barbaric terrorist attack in 1982, which killed dozens of people.
What we have, then, is a complex and dense counter-narrative formed by the discovery of this archive of national memories, as is explained in a subtitle, as a final credit, with the transcription of a phone conversation with the filmmaker which explains the discovery of the archive. Through these documents, films and photographic material the urgency of this cinema is created: it is a counter-archive of sorts intended to recontextualize images and stitch together materials, whilst realizing that the past always returns to the present, just like in the initial spiel. (The film had been finished before the tragic events of 7 October 2023.)
Aljafari even directly interferes with the images, combining – through Yanning Willmann’s disturbing montage – fragments from different eras, not even shying away from using red paint to deface images and text indexed by the Israeli authorities in an effective reflex of self-censorship. The tragic history of Palestine is revisited, through excerpts from the British occupation during the British Mandate, the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948, the Nakba (deportation and genocide), accompanied by images of prison camps, abandoned corpses, banal street scenes and demolitions, etc.
By including this red element of faces and bodies – and even rivers that turn into blood – these archival images acquire a new meaning and an unexpected effect of artistic beauty in a space of desolation. The effect is continued in the contrast of the occupying gaze, in excerpts from Israeli films, with languid couples, in sunset scenes, cursing their future as hostages of endless pleasure.
This is, in fact, authentic cinematic sabotage, where Aljafari’s desire to prove the lives of his people is felt. Something is returned throughout a complex layered work, with the alteration of new sounds, the inclusion of red silhouettes of children, elements of fire, going to the limit of reintroducing scratches and defects in the film, in a clear inversion of restoration, as a way of rescuing sabotaged memory. This is the self-narrative of the “camera of the dispossessed.”
Paulo Portugal
Edited by Birgit Beumers
© FIPRESCI 2024