Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s new collage film, *A Fidai Film*, presents a powerful visual response to the historical suppression of Palestinian narratives. The film is constructed from archival footage originally housed in the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut, which was seized by Israeli forces during the 1982 Lebanese civil war. Much of the centre’s collection—including books, newspapers, and audiovisual materials—remains under Israeli military control.
The archival images featured in *A Fidai Film* are physically marked by political censorship, exhibiting scratches, graininess, and pixelation. Aljafari employs a non-linear editing style that forgoes chronological storytelling in favor of recurring imagery to emphasize the persistence of violence experienced by Palestinians over decades. The film shows black-and-white footage dating back to the British Mandate period, depicting soldiers patrolling streets and inflicting violence on the Indigenous population, with direct visual parallels drawn to actions by Israeli forces in later years. Repeated scenes of demolished homes, frightened children, and the bodies of Palestinians killed by occupation forces underscore a continuous pattern of conflict and suffering.
Beyond assembling historical footage, the film actively intervenes to reclaim these archives. Many reels bear disparaging captions added by Israeli authorities at the time, which Aljafari obscures with bold streaks of red paint. In place of these official labels, the filmmaker inserts excerpts from poems by Palestinian writers such as Ghassan Kanafani, restoring a sense of humanity and voice to the images. This act of overlaying poetic text onto censored archives transforms *A Fidai Film* into both an artistic statement and a form of historical restitution.
The film offers viewers a momentary liberation of suppressed materials, inviting reflection on the long history of erasure and resistance within Palestinian collective memory. *A Fidai Film* began screening on True Story from October 16.