A Fidai Film

The looting and confiscation of archives are techniques specific to genocidal colonial practices aimed at annihilating a people considered an enemy, a people one wishes to see disappear. It is therefore not surprising that the Israeli Defense Forces seized thousands of documents preserved at the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut, before proceeding with its total destruction during the 1982 invasion, in the midst of the civil war. The oppressor seizes these documents in order to rob the Palestinian people of their collective memory, in an effort of erasure—a gesture of unspeakable violence, as strategic as it was premeditated.

It is around this event that the experimental documentary A Fidai Film is constructed, staging the recovery of these looted Palestinian archives, which remain to this day preserved within the State of Israel—an archival aberration. Filmmaker and researcher Kamal Aljafari managed to gain access to some of these audiovisual documents confiscated by the Israeli army, which he uses as raw material in order to reclaim the history of his people. The images are edited, altered, and distorted, in an act of transgressive and courageous artistic activism.

But can we really speak here of a “recovery,” when the filmmaker is simply reclaiming what already belongs to him, what was stolen? These documents should never have ended up in Israel’s archival holdings in the first place. Indeed, one notices in several sequences that descriptive text in Hebrew has been superimposed onto the images, thereby degrading their integrity. The artist thus grants himself the right, and the permission, to strike through these textual descriptions with vivid reddish marks—and does so with precision. At times, this film plunges us into an archival mise en abyme, since, unable to reclaim the territory that was violently confiscated from the Palestinians, Aljafari at least attempts to reclaim the images that tell the rich history of his people before and after the 1948 occupation, which persists and intensifies to this very day. The archives suddenly seem suspended outside of any fixed temporality, where past, present, and future collide in a deliberately unsettling nonlinear maelstrom. A resonance emerges before our eyes between the occupied land and its very representation.

In order to visually represent the constant aggression suffered by Palestinians for decades, the filmmaker enacts a violence upon the archival images themselves, damaging or covering them with red scratches—a bright red omnipresent throughout the film, inevitably evoking the color of blood, blood that flows through our veins and is spilled unjustly and needlessly on the ground by the genocidal madness of Israeli apartheid, despite the world’s outcry. The term Fidai can be translated as “one who sacrifices himself for the homeland,” and Aljafari’s film stands as a radical and daring gesture of documentary resistance.

Frédéric Savard
Archivist and programmer