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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