Three MiniDV tapes documenting Gaza in 2001 surface, bearing witness to a vanished world. The story begins as a search for a former prisoner lost to war and time, evolving into a journey across the Gaza Strip. Guiding this journey is Hassan, a local who would later disappear without a trace. The camera reveals Gaza's landscapes and captures its daily rhythms. Beyond the fragments of an irreversibly changed reality, this forgotten footage is reawakened, becoming a cinematic meditation on memory itself.

Kamal Aljafari, one of the most innovative voices in found-footage cinema, returns with his latest work, With Hasan in Gaza. While sifting through old materials, the Palestinian filmmaker unearthed three DV tapes from a 2001 trip to the Gaza Strip. They contained fragments of a place and time that no longer exist—a world since swallowed by the devastation of war. 

In his signature style, Aljafari transforms these archival images into a ghostly projection, collapsing the distance between then and now. What begins as a search for Hassan, a local guide from that trip now lost to time and conflict, becomes an unexpected journey across Gaza. The camera drifts through streets and landscapes, lingering on the fleeting textures of everyday life—small moments of existence that may never return. 

The question haunts the film: Where is Hasan now? Aljafari’s search for this erased figure becomes a meditation on all who have vanished in the fog of war, and a tribute to the resilience of life under siege. Applying his concept of “the camera of the dispossessed,” he shows the archive’s power not merely to preserve, but to resurrect—to breathe new, urgent meaning into moments that were almost lost forever.

An homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and that came back to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence, or non-existence. It is a film about the catastrophe, and the poetry that resists. This is my first film, which I have never made.

• ProducerKamal ALJAFARI, Flavia MAZZARINO
• Screenplay Kamal ALJAFARI
• Cinematography Kamal ALJAFARI
• Edit Kamal ALJAFARI
• Sound Kamal ALJAFARI
• Music Simon FISHER TURNER, Attila FARAVELLI