With Hasan in Gaza

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Ma’ Hasan Fi Ghazza
Kamal Aljafari
2025
106 min.
DCP
Palæstina, Tyskland, Frankrig, Qatar
arabisk tale / engelske undertekster

“I went to Gaza twenty-four years ago searching for a friend, without an address.” Kamal Aljafaris With Hasan in Gaza er en filmisk refleksion over minder og tab, og den fanger et Gaza fra fortiden og liv, der måske aldrig vil blive fundet igen.

With Hasan in Gaza havde verdenspremiere i hovedkonkurrencen på dette års Locarno filmfestival, men den er lige så gammel. som den er ny: Den består af optagelser fra tre nyligt genopdagede MiniDV-videobånd, som instruktør Kamal Aljafari havde medbragt til Gaza i 2001. Han var rejst dertil for at finde en ven, han havde siddet i fængsel med i 1989, og havde den lokale guide Hasan Elboubou ved sin side på rejsen.

Filmen er grundlæggende en road movie, der bevæger sig fra det nordlige Gaza til det sydlige i en søgen efter en ven, hvis skæbne er ukendt. Med kameraet i hånden passerer Aljafari og Elboubou legende børn ved havet, ruiner, mennesker i samtaler, mens Israels angreb fylder nætterne.

Aljafaris behandling af dette hjemmevideo-materiale er minimal. Han har ikke tilføjet en essayistisk fortællerstemme, der reflekterer over alt det, der er gået tabt siden 2001. Han har heller ikke tilføjet nyt billedmateriale. Han har blot indføjet enkelte tekststykker, som indrammer filmen, samt et diskret soundtrack, der blander nykomponeret musik med populære sange fra regionen. Ellers lader Aljafari råmaterialet være filmen og stoler på, at det kan reflektere for sig selv. Dokumenter fra dengang, set med øjne fra i dag.

With Hasan in Gaza er en filmisk refleksion over minder og tab, og den fanger et Gaza fra fortiden og liv, der måske aldrig vil blive fundet igen. Kamal Aljafari anvender filmmediet til at undersøge, hvordan billedernes figurative materialitet kan blive en abstraktion og et spøgelse, og kobler denne undersøgelse til et område, der er lige så virkeligt og konkret, som det er abstrakt og fantasmagorisk: Palæstina.

Selv har Kamal Aljfari udtalt om filmen: “En hyldest til Gaza og dets befolkning, til alt det, der blev udslettet, og som kom tilbage til mig i dette presserende øjeblik af palæstinensisk eksistens eller ikke-eksistens. Det er en film om katastrofen og den poesi, der modstår.”

Al overskud fra denne visning doneres til Thousand Madleens. Kamal Aljafari har også doneret sit honorar til selvsamme organisation.

Præsenteres i Empire. Tak til Flavia Mazzarino og Kamal Aljafari.
Kopi: Aljafari Productions.

4. november
19.00
Empire bio
(Guldbergsgade 29F, 2200 København)

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INTERVIEW WITH KELLY REICHARDT
Scott Roxborough, 2025

What was the origin of this story, the idea to do a heist movie?
I’ve just always been interested in heists. I like to dig around and read about them when they come up —they’re fun to read about. And I read an article on the 50th anniversary of the art heist in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1972. The article was about these teenagers who got caught up in an art heist at the Worcester Art Museum. That piqued my interest. So it was just a little seed for how to start telling this story.

Did your family background have anything to do with it? Your father was a detective.
No, not at all. My dad was a crime scene detective, my mom was an undercover narcotics agent, and my stepfather was an FBI agent. But it wasn’t really about that. I mean, while making the film, because it was set in the 1970s, a ton of things came back to me from being a kid then — being in the car all the time, that sort of thing. But there’s no biographical element in it.

You said it was the 50th anniversary of this particular heist, but were there any specific heists that you based the story of the film on?
No, but the Worcester heist was a jumping-off point for sure. Those were snatch-and-grabs like this before security cameras and other measures were put in. Museums had roundabouts in front of them, so robbers could just drive up, retirees were the security guards. Before the Gardner Museum [heist of 1990], there were a lot of these kinds of robberies. At the Worcester Museum, they took a Rembrandt and four huge paintings. That was a little bit of a stepping-off point. I liked the idea of it being in New England, so we set it in Framingham, which is close to Worcester. I wanted it to be smaller, not like masterpieces being taken. It became about painting by Arthur Dove. That was fun to dive into.

Was the idea that stealing Arthur Dove paintings, instead of Rembrants makes the whole thing slightly less grand or ambitious?
Yeah, it lowers the stakes. I felt it was better for the size of my film, really, and for the ambitions of this character. I felt like it was easier to get my arms around than having it be paintings everyone knows, like Degas or Rembrandt. I went through a lot of different stages of what it would be, but I kept coming back to Dove. I was a little bit worried, to be honest, because Dove paintings are quite small, and on their own they’re not majestic necessarily. One could dismiss them or find them unremarkable. He wasn’t very popular in the ’70s. But Tony Gasparro, the production designer, and I came to believe that if you set them in a room with multiple ones and gave them the prestige of a museum setting, that would carry it. We found one visual of a Dove show from the ’70s and riffed off that.

For the 70s setting, what is it about that era that resonates now?
Well, I liked the idea of taking a sort of classic character — James Mooney [played by John O’Connor] is kind of like a man-boy, and a father and a husband — who makes a big career move and tries to execute it to the best of his ability, then gets stomped on and doesn’t know how to recover from it. That’s sort of within the conventions of heist thinking — we think of [French director Jean-Pierre] Melville or something. But then there’s an undertone of a character who feels detached from what’s happening in the country. He’s too old to be drafted, he’s a middle-class kid with a judge father, and he has two kids. He’s not worried about being drafted, so he’s not tuned in.

The idea that keeps reappearing in the films I’ve made is this question about the individual versus the person in a community, or in a society, or as a citizen of the world. Can you really remain separate from what’s going on around you? Or does the drag of it catch up with you? Are we just all more connected than that?

Can you keep yourself separate from the politics around you, which is a particularly important question for artists.
Yeah. A lot of people say, “Well, I’m just not political.” And I think: Do you have a bank account? You’re political. Not to be political is a very privileged position. If you can go through life and not worry that someone’s going to knock on your door and take you to a prison in El Salvador, then lucky you.

Uddrag fra “Kelly Reichardt on ‘The Mastermind,’ Josh O’Connor and What the ’70s Have to Teach Us Today“, The Hollywood Reporter, 2025.

Tusind sole

With hasan in gaza

“I went to Gaza twenty-four years ago searching for a friend, without an address.” Kamal Aljafaris With Hasan in Gaza er en filmisk refleksion over minder og tab, og den fanger et Gaza fra fortiden og liv, der måske aldrig vil blive fundet igen.