A Fidai Film

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and simultaneously looted the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. The archive contained historical documents on Palestine, including a collection of still photographs and moving images. Using this as a point of departure, A Fidai Film explores the visual memory of the looting. Aljafari tracks down and reclaims images now held in various Israeli archives. He selects, restructures, and obscures them. The result is a meditative and unsettling testimony to a hidden history, and to the image’s dual power: to record history and to erase it.