2024 - 69th Edition

A Fidai Film

Kamal Aljafari

Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brazil, France

- 2024

Estreno nacional

In 1965, the Palestine Research Centre (PRC) was established in Beirut to preserve the cultural archives of Palestine's history and political struggle. Seventeen years later, the Israeli army raided this archive, appropriating the entire cultural heritage. The award-winning film A Fidai Film, awarded at Visions du Réel, is an archaeological exercise that brings to light many of the images that have remained hidden in the Israeli files since then. Photos and videos that acquire new meanings here, in a double process of reclaiming and restoring a lost legacy. Kamal Alfajari reflects on the links between a country's visual memory and its resistance history, revealing the systematic invisibility of the Palestinian people. Demonstrating that another narrative is possible and, above all, that cinema remains a powerful tool for liberation.

Kamal Aljafari

Palestinian filmmaker. He has taught filmmaking at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. His contributions to the field were recognised with fellowships at the Film Study Center - Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and most recently at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University 2024-2025. In May 2024, IndieLisboa highlighted his contributions to cinema by dedicating its retrospective section to his work. Additionally, his installation ‘The Camera of the Dispossessed’ was showcased at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023). His film ‘A Fidai Film’ (2024) won the grand jury prize at Visions du Réel. He is currently developing a fiction film set to be shot in Jaffa.

O.V. in Arabic, Hebrew, English subtitled in English and Spanish