A Fidai Film

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut, raiding the Palestinian Research Centre and looting its entire archive. Containing historical documents and still and moving images of Palestine, the archive becomes the premise for A Fidai Film, which explores the visual memory of this looting through images now held in Israeli archives.

Kamal Aljafari: ‘Often in newsreels and films the Hebrew word for “Saboteurs” is used to describe Palestinians, in particular the Palestinian freedom fighters, or fida’een, who led operations against the occupation in the 1960s and 1970s. And the longer I watched, the more I felt myself wanting to become a saboteur.My project chronicles my sabotage of the Cinematheque material. It is a sabotage that is also a reconstruction, reclaiming from the footage latent narratives, creating a counter-archive from repurposed images, and making Israeli fiction more fictional, so that another reality can be revealed.Repurposed images and films and names and texts and logos found in them are digitally defaced. Red scribbles blot out parts of the footage. Israeli colonists are cut out, or replaced with random material found in the backgrounds of their scenes. Their presence becomes ghostly and spectral. By such means, I reconstruct a Palestinian image that no longer has an archive. It is a fidai film.’– Excerpted from Kamal Aljafari, ‘A Fidai Film: A Project Idea’, Journal of Visual Culture 20.2, p. 347, August 2021.