With Hasan in Gaza: Rediscovered footage creates a powerful portrait of Palestinian life under occupation

• Reviewed from the 69th BFI London Film Festival 2025

In 2001, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari travelled through Gaza with resident Hasan Elboubou as his guide – whose fate remains unknown today – in search of Abdel Rahim, a man he had been imprisoned with in 1989. Having rediscovered the miniDV tapes that contained recordings of his journey, Aljafari assembled the footage into With Hasan in Gaza: a restrained yet affecting testimony to the long history of Palestinian struggle under Israeli occupation. 

The film’s narrative, unfolding during the Second Intifada in 2001, is communicated in part using text, sometimes layered over the tape footage and occasionally, more intrusively, against a black screen, describing Aljafari’s experience of imprisonment through the First Intifada. Aljafari was editing the footage during Israel’s escalation of atrocities post-October 7th 2023, and the director entwines its history with the present day situation in Palestine – acknowledging the horrors of an unfolding genocide and a broken ceasefire. 

Despite With Hasan in Gaza’s bleak framework, the documentary carries a humanistic spirit that resists the erasure of Palestinian culture. The camerawork behind Aljafari’s grainy, home-video style footage is filled with life as the director’s lens ducks in and out of taxis, bobbles through crowds, and glances to meet or avert its subjects’ gaze. 

What’s fascinating is the people’s responses to being filmed as they go about their lives in Gaza. Some residents accept the camera’s presence with indifference before warming to it and jokingly engaging with Aljafari; some demand that their shelled houses be recorded for evidence of the injustice brought upon them by Israel. It is the children, though, who steal the show – almost all of them request to be filmed and for no other reason beyond their evident delight in the knowledge that they are on camera. These sequences highlight the poignancy, so readily felt by the spirited, bustling children, in being recorded, preserved and immortalised.

But it is not always simple to find willing subjects. One resident initially rejects Aljafari, fearful of the consequences. Indeed, where the act of documenting meets resistance, it stems exclusively from the presence of Israeli forces. When nearing an IDF soldier, Aljafari is warned to lay down his camera, and other residents report soldiers firing shots to scare foreign delegates who might provide the world with first-hand evidence of what the occupation entails. 

With this crux – to film, or not to film – With Hasan in Gaza brilliantly centres the need to bear witness as no less than a matter of life and death, preservation and loss, liberation and occupation. It is hard to be sure of the fate of any of the people filmed in the documentary, but Aljafari ensures they won’t be forgotten.