WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > A FIDAI FILM

HEART OF HAWICK
FRIDAY 2 MAY
16:30 – 18:00 / 77′

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This film has descriptive subtitles. The introduction will have BSL interpretation.

Content warning: contains flashing imagery; discussion of death, war, injury, violence; depiction of fire, war, guns, violence, blood.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari’s award-winning feature, powerfully reclaims archive images of Palestinian life, plundered from the Palestinian Research Centre during Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 1982. A work of radical reimagining, Aljafari’s film represents a major artistic achievement, simultaneously documenting and intervening upon the systematic violences through which Palestinian identity has been continually looted, reconstituted, colonised.

At first glance, A Fidai Film appears to be a straightforward compilation of archival footage. Documentary scenes of everyday life in the port city of Jaffa during the so-called British Mandate for Palestine unfold in low-grade monochrome. Enhanced by added sound, they reveal a place of contrast and cohabitation on the cusp of technological change, with people walking the streets alongside donkey-drawn carts and automobiles; they return the camera’s gaze as in the early panoramas of European film pioneers.

Only through a careful combination of techniques and timing are the origins and meaning of the film’s footage revealed. As if to acknowledge the malleability of history, the ways in which it is actively contested, Aljafari opts for a formal approach that continually draws attention to itself. There is the actual documentation of terror through the ranks and eras: statesmen and decision-makers, military occupiers, bombs and death; the deforestation projects, the gentrification programmes, the quick and prolonged devastation of sites and people.

But there are also the sonic manipulations, which provide a constant reminder of the film’s own constructedness: the synced explosions, the deep rumbling of burning flames, the electronic howling winds, the eerie hiss and haunting crackle suggestive of analogue playback. There is also the onscreen text, imposed by the Israeli regime following its confiscation of the archives we’re watching, which Aljafari rejects and redacts with scribbles in blood red. This is a deeply attentive act of sabotage.

Like the most accomplished compilations, the film’s broader thesis is teased at from the outset. The opening shots of A Fidai Film, functioning like the epigraph to a truly insidious narrative whose catastrophic scale defies comprehension, are of the Mediterranean Sea. A seascape in high contrast is gradually accompanied by a minimalist roar: a sonic ambience that subtly haunts. And on the horizon, silhouetted against an impressive painterly sky, two British warships sit.