'With Hassan in Gaza': Director's forgotten footage nominated at Europe's top film awards
'With Hassan in Gaza', recently screened at the 14th Athens Innovative Film Festival, is nominated in two categories at the European Film Awards in Berlin on Saturday. Its director Kamal Aljafari tells Euronews Culture the documentary is "an act of resistance against the erasure of memory".
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00:00In 2001, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal al-Jafari traveled to Gaza looking for a former prisoner with whom he had lost contact over the years.
00:10Together with Hassan, a local guide, he started from the north and ended up in the south of Gaza, crossing roads and landscapes and meeting locals.
00:19He recorded this journey with his camera.
00:22All of this was included in three mini-DV tapes, which the filmmaker discovered by chance last year as he had forgotten they existed.
00:31For me, the discovery of the tapes, these three tapes, was really almost like a sign of life, you know, against erasure.
00:39And when I started watching, I was very touched by everything that I was seeing
00:44because the material that was filmed back then in 2001 with the aim of finding a friend
00:50becomes today a film about finding all these people that appear on the footage,
00:59all these faces and all the places that, in fact, no longer exist today.
01:14Gaza already back then was an open-air prison where people had no freedom in, you know, moving
01:25and they were living under occupation.
01:28And you can see the roots of the violence that, in fact, became worse and worse with years
01:33and, of course, in the last two years, that the roots of that is there in the condition of people being occupied, not being free.
01:39What this war did was destroying any possibility of life with no schools, with no homes for people, with no hospitals.
01:49So anything that happened there would make the people simply want to leave.
01:54And this was the aim of the war.
01:56It's very difficult to speak of hope in the condition we have today
01:59because there's no real international pressure on Israel to basically not only let the people of Gaza restore their life,
02:13which is really broken into pieces in every sense of the word,
02:17but also to have a perspective where the people of Palestine and the people of Gaza
02:22have a self-determination that they have their own country, you know.
02:27The documentary with Hassan in Gaza was honoured with the Europa Cinemas Label Award
02:33at the Locano Film Festival.
02:35It has participated in over 70 film festivals.
02:38It is nominated in the categories of Best European Documentary
02:42and Best European Film of the Year at the European Film Awards.
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