‘With Hasan in Gaza’ Locarno Review: Time, Memory and a Vanishing World

With Hasan in Gaza is, in a way, a found footage film—but with a particular twist: the person who shot the material is also its director. The footage was captured in 2001, left tucked away in a drawer, and only recently revisited, at a moment of profound pain for the place where it was filmed. Back then, Kamal Aljafari traveled through Gaza with a local guide named Hasan, searching for Abdel Rahim, a man with whom he had shared time in prison in 1989—during the First Intifada—and from whom he had never heard again. While the 2001 journey centers on that search, the true heart of the film is its portrait of a Gaza that no longer exists as it does here.

Without knowing that detail, one could easily assume the film was shot not so long ago, which makes it all the more startling to discover it is, in relative terms, old. What Aljafari shows is a drive through cities, villages, beaches, and refugee camps as they were at the time—already living under ongoing conflict with Israel, but not yet at the level of ferocity that has erupted over the past two years, following Hamas’s bloody terrorist attack on the country and the devastating, disproportionate, and seemingly endless Israeli military response.

The confusion is also fueled by the film’s depiction of how Gazans were already living in constant fear of missiles and cross-border assaults, venturing outside cautiously and only at certain hours, mourning their dead, railing against checkpoints and security forces, and expressing the sensation of living in a prison. Meanwhile—on a narrative thread that remains secondary—Kamal and Hasan search for Abdel. Yet it is clear that the search serves more as a pretext for the journey, for showing the country, and above all, for talking to its people about their lives and their long history of suffering.

“This is the first film I never made,” says the director of A Fidai Film and Recollection, whose debut feature, The Roof, premiered in 2006 and was originally intended to include this material—until he decided against it. What is striking about the document is that it captures both the differences and the similarities between then and now. This is not a vision of a “paradise lost,” but rather a glimpse of a somewhat less violent stage of the same conflict—one that, given what has happened since, now seems almost tolerable.

But in another way, the film makes one truth undeniable—especially for those who only became aware of Gaza’s plight in 2023: this has been a tense, violent, and painful situation for many years. The period Aljafari records coincides with the Second Intifada of 2000, which marked the beginning of rocket exchanges across the border. By the time the film was shot, the barrier that would severely restrict the movement of Gaza’s residents was already in place.

As children play on the beach and adults spend their time in cafés, it’s impossible not to wonder what has happened to them in the years since. Many of those smiling children may, for various reasons, no longer be alive. And the towns we see here—largely intact as Hasan’s car travels from north to south—may now be nothing but ruins.