'With Hasan in Gaza'

In 2001, filmmaker Aljafari, briefly imprisoned in his teens by the Israeli Occupation during the first Palestinian Intifada of 1989, set out on a north-to-south tour of Gaza in search of a man he’d met while behind bars, bringing along a local guide, Hasan, and a MiniDV camera with which to document his journey. Some two decades later, Aljafari revisited the footage he’d captured, and from it sprang this plaintive, lyrical travelogue, a loving record of cities, neighborhoods, and gathering places since reduced to rubble, of people whose current fates are unknown. Not a work of “nostalgia” for bygone times—incoming ordinance was a reality a quarter century ago, and the subjects of "With Hasan in Gaza" all seem to have their stories of savage raids and worse—but a work that brims with its maker’s affection for all that he sees and shows.

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