A FIDAI FILM
by Kamal Aljafari
In Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles, 2024, 78 min, DCP. Distributed by Prismatic Ground.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
 
Prismatic Ground presents a theatrical premiere run of prolific Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s multiple-award-winning A FIDAI FILM, a new feature that powerfully reimagines/repurposes stolen archival material to battle the violent colonial forces of theft, destruction, and erasure. The film’s Arabic title, which translates to something like “To Make a Film is a Fidai Act”, posits revolutionary filmmaking as a tool in the struggle towards liberation, and continues to uphold Aljafari’s practice as a relentless form of cultural resistance.

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 The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images.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 its departure point, 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.

“It is not only a project about the present past that needs to be recognized, but also about the future that is still possible to define. Repurposed moving images, names, and texts are digitally defaced. Red scribbles blot out parts of the footage. Figures are cut out, or replaced with random material re-appropriated from backgrounds. Kamal Aljafari calls his counter-archive ‘the camera of the dispossessed.’” –KAMAL ALJAFARI PRODUCTIONS

Preceded by:
PARADISO, XXXI, 108
2022, 22 min, DCP
“How to express what is absent, marginalized and made to disappear through the use of violence? Kamal Aljafari’s work has been revolving around this basic constellation of memory politics for years. In the shots of an elaborately staged Israeli army propaganda film from the 1970s, condensed into frenzied cascades of images, Palestine, imagined solely as a battlefield, once again becomes ‘a shadow that runs faster than the body that belongs to it’”. –Stephan Settele, VIENNALE

Total running time: ca. 105 min.