It’s easy to talk about the power of the archive, and how we must preserve it. But what about the archives that are actively sabotaged and kept hidden? Do they remain an archive, or only when they are unearthed and compiled together? How is an archive revived when it is gate kept for militaristic purposes, and designed to humiliate the memory of what came before, during, and after the violence.
This is the function of A Fidai Film, directed by Kamal Aljafari. In Arabic, it is titled: “الفلم عمل فدائي” or “The film is an act of fidai”. ‘Fidai’ refers to someone who sacrifices or martyrs themselves for a cause, with a specific and historical connotation to the Palestinian struggle. In countering the official narrative of the foundations of the state of Israel, Aljafari reclaims the theft of Palestinian history, both by land and in its visual memory.
During the 78-minute runtime, we become acquainted with a series of black-and-white and colour film footage of the landscape of Palestine; from the hilltops and rocky terrain to the flowing river streams, the Mediterranean sea, and longstanding churches and mosques. This is accompanied by closeups of Palestinians in traditional headdress, farming, caring for flock which contrast between shots of them trying to flee attacks on their homes and villages, people pulled in stretches, and climbing down balconies.
In much of the footage, writing in Hebrew has been added on top by the IDF in an attempt to obscure the video proof, and by extension the reality of Palestinian existence. Aljafari circumvents this by scribbling over the words with red, a motif used throughout to cover faces or objects.
Whether it be the humiliation of being searched by soldiers, crowds being forcibly marched with their hands in the air, people escaping with their families, these images are striking against footage of people walking through the streets and going about their daily lives, soft singing, children playing, and people working.
Aljafari and Attila Faravelli’s sound design, paired with original music by Simon Fisher Turner, infuses the film with a melodic score, as well as classical Arabic music, voiceover narration of poems and letters by Ghassan Kanafani and Anis Sayegh.
Throughout, you are made to feel as if you are behind the camera. The camera is your head moving left to right, up and own, as you look at the lives lived, and inevitably, the lives that were not lived due to the ongoing genocide and occupation of an entire people.
The life behind this film inevitably seeps through the narrativisation and compiled imagery. We are deliberately shown footage of Israeli soldiers outside the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s headquarters in Beirut and the Palestinian Research Centre in the Hamra district, which was the PLO’s academic wing before they left Beirut after invading in 1982.
There are trucks containing files and documents — books, press clippings, educational materials — which they refer to as “propaganda”, taken to be sorted through for potential usefulness in future ‘military operations’. IDF soldiers speak to the camera, showing what they found, and the meticulous organisation of these materials to see methods of how the PLO works.
For instance, there is scene with English and Hebrew subtitled under “IDF & Defense Establishment Archives: UNRWA – A story that needs to be told” and lists the following as key information for the Israeli military:
“A camp of Palestinian refugees: a conversation with an elderly couple, women sitting on carpets outside the tent, children in the camp, a road sign to an Arab city, minarets, children in the mud, women washing clothes, market, B83-211.”
In doing so, Aljafari screens the colonial narratives and occupying gaze before deconstructing it, to use it as “the camera of the dispossessed”.
The film’s epilogue includes contemporary footage of Gaza, where soldiers take a soccer ball from a group of boys, and threaten to hit them, showing how the long-documented Nakba or Catastrophe of the Palestinian people, will never not be relevant.
A Fidai Film has been often referred to as an archaeological exercise, conducted by an archaeologist, as it brings to the forefront what was hidden and reclaims it in an act of artistic resistance and protest. In both its journey to creation and in its final form, the documentary-cinematic medium is a tool of liberation.
As quoted in the film, Ghassan Kanafani writes, “To those who died for the land of sad oranges and to those who have not yet died…” Aljafari’s work is a testament to the lives lived and the lives not lived due to the occupation of Palestine since 1948, and ongoing ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. It is not merely an archive or record, it is an interrogation of what has happened, what is happening, and what will continue to happen until there is a free Palestine.
A Fidai Film is screening at the Palestinian Film Festival Australia.
