A Fidai Film review – Palestinian collage film transforms suppressed footage into works of art

In Arabic, “fidai” means someone willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Borrowing this word, which is at times used in a military context, for his collage film, Palestinian film-maker Kamal Aljafari stages a potent uprising of images against the tide of propaganda and historical erasure. Much of the film draws on archive materials once housed in the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, Israeli forces raided the centre and seized the archive. Most of these documents on Palestinian history – books, newspapers, audiovisual artefacts – are believed to still be in the hands of the Israeli army.

Obtained through clandestine means, the footage that resurfaces in Aljafari’s film bears the physical traces of political suppression. The images are scratched, grainy and pixelated, yet through the power of montage they evoke startling visual parallels that point to the relentless violence endured by Palestinians through the decades. Black-and-white film taken during the British mandate show soldiers patrolling the streets and inflicting violence upon the Indigenous population; similar acts then committed by Israeli forces. In place of a chronological order, the editing builds a sense of continuity through recurring images. Time and time again, we see torn-down houses, terrorised children and the bodies of Palestinians murdered by occupation forces.

More than simply a work of compilation, the film also performs its own historical intervention. Many of the reels are imprinted with pejorative captions added by Israeli authorities, which Aljafari covers in streaks of red paint. In their place are excerpts from poems by Palestinian authors such as Ghassan Kanafani, whose words return a sense of humanity to these past images. Through these strategies of reclamation, Aljafari’s film brings liberation, if only momentarily, to a captive archive.