The title of Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s latest project contains a triple meaning. The Arabic fidai or fedayeen refers to a self-sacrificing guerrilla fighter; Fida’i is also the national anthem of Palestine. Yet in Israel, the term is translated into Hebrew as “saboteur.”¹ This colonial reframing turns in on itself in A Fidai Film (2024), which appropriates, rearranges, and alters archival footage from the Israel Defense Forces Archives (IDFA), including material looted from the Palestinian Research Centre by the Israeli army during their invasion of Beirut in 1982.

Israel’s systemic campaign to censor and erase evidence of Palestinian history, knowledge, and sovereignty continues to target Palestinian archives, and the damaged fragments left in its wake form both the substance and subject of Aljafari’s film. A Fidai Film incorporates archival footage created from Palestinian, Israeli, and other perspectives and produced in a multiplicity of modes including documentary, narrative fiction, news reports, and television interviews. To obtain the material—which remains in the possession of the IDFA—Aljafari developed his own strategy of sabotage. Barred from accessing it through official channels, he had to rely both on the fraught mediation of an Israeli scholar who shared files only in severely compressed form, and on covertly screen-recording films available through the online portals of Israeli archives and cinémathèques.

The archive continually reappears in Palestinian cinema. A Fidai Film joins a corpus of work—including Azza El-Hassan’s Kings and Extras (2004), Mahasen Nasser-Eldin’s The Silent Protest (2019), and Mohanad Yaqubi’s R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022)—that grapples with the fragmented status of the material archive and its role as a repository for histories of dispossession and resistance. Aljafari’s material spans from the 1920s to the 1980s and encompasses multiple spheres of Palestinian history including the British Mandate, the Nakba, and resistance movements of the 1960s and 70s. From this wide-ranging selection of material, Aljafari has assembled a poetic collage which strives not for the futile and artificial endeavour of reconstructing a complete, linear history, but to narrate a place, “and what happened to this place, what is happening to this place until today.”² Captured on hand-painted colour film, some of the oldest footage emanates a nostalgic yearning for the rolling, rugged land itself. Once a well of sustenance, its flowing rivers, flowering meadows and fields are, in the later material, scarred by the installation of barbed-wire fences; the homes built upon it are devoured by bulldozers, tanks, and fire.

Cutting omnidirectionally between decades (and linked together with Simon Fisher Turner’s eerie, looping score), images of violent oppression reappear in different forms: checkpoints, men lined up with their hands bound, bullets that have gouged chunks out of a home’s wooden window frame, bodies strewn across urban streets, grieving families, neighbourhoods turned to rubble. Through editing which places them in contextless proximity, the British soldier is reincarnated into the Israeli soldier (and back again); those expelled from their homes during the Nakba become uniformed resistance fighters whose resolute eyes stare unflinchingly into ours. The film’s physical surface is also politicised: histories of making and handling with both care and violence manifest in scratches, time codes, rips, grain, and skipping frames.

Much of the footage used is unaccompanied by any announcement of the time or location of its capture, and the resulting ambiguity in the eyes of the unfamiliar—my own included—creates the possibility for emotional associations untethered from cultural specificity. For Aljafari this deliberate abstraction is a tool of universality, a way for the film to become not only about Palestine, “but any colonised place.”³ As I watch the film from so-called Australia, where it fittingly screened as part of the Brunswick Underground Film Festival in Naarm, it is impossible not to see its images in parallel to terra nullius, the lie upon which the ancestral lands of First Peoples was similarly stolen.

Aljafari’s insurgent editing frequently extracts resonances against the grain of the material’s original intention. In one section, clippings from an Israeli fiction film made in the 1960s, which follows a young couple passively lounging about the coast, is crosscut with interview footage of Palestinian photographer Hani Jawharieh’s heartbroken wife in the wake of his death. Eyes downcast and cheeks glistening with tears, she recounts the obligation he felt to serve his homeland, for which he died while filming combat in Lebanon in 1976. Concurrently, Aljafari exposes within what is ostensibly an apolitical romance a profound colonial apathy, contrasting Jawharieh’s wife’s pain with the settlers’ sunkissed inertia. Subtitled in French, their words are euphemistic: the Israeli woman asks, “Why do they have to pay attention to us?” The man replies, “Because, after all, we are here.” “Where?” she asks. “Here!” he repeats. Aljafari covers their faces and bodies, as well as the landscape surrounding them, with blocks of violently bright crimson: it’s in the rocks, the clouds at dusk, and the light glittering off the water.

Aljafari’s interventions also infiltrate the realm of language. Much of the looted material which appears in A Fidai Film has been imprinted with IDFA archival inscriptions, which overlay their contents with coldly literal and sometimes revealing descriptions: one brands footage of Palestinians orange-picking in the West Bank village of Qalandia in 1957 as “terrorists.” Aljafari scribbles many of these watermarks out with the same bright red. Where it elsewhere marks the unseen violence lurking beneath the image, red here becomes a colour of anger with the power to resist and disavow the coloniser’s claim to ownership, collapsing together signs of theft and reclamation in a single image. In other fragments, Aljafari adds words of his own choosing: excerpts from the short fiction of Palestinian militant Ghassan Kanafani, much of whose work was inspired by collecting the testimonies of refugees. Against black-and-white footage shot from the back of a train travelling along a mountainous track appears a fragment of ‘Letter from Gaza’ (1956), wherein the young narrator describes returning to the destroyed neighbourhood in which he grew up.

The seminal Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said once wrote that “things like keys, title deeds (useless now), family photographs, newspaper clippings, school certificates, marriage licences—these are the bedrock of Palestinian memory.”⁴ A Fidai Film reckons with this profound fragmentation, sabotaging the archive in an act of reclamation and resistance. As Fadi AbuNe’meh and Sima M have recently reiterated in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, while “neither words nor images can stand against the onslaught of arms, drones, and bombs [or] the relentless loss of life,” neither can the evidence of the lives, knowledges and histories they contain ever be completely erased.⁵

A Fidai Film screened at the inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival on Saturday the 31st of May. It also screened across Australia at the Palestinian Film Festival this May.

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Alex Williams is a PhD student, writer, and editor living on Wurundjeri Country. Their doctoral research investigates corporeal vulnerability in contemporary slow cinema. They are co-coordinator of the community engagement program Screening Ideas and a committee member of the Melbourne Cinémathèque.

1. Aljafari, quoted in Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, “A Fidai Film: Screening and Discussion with Kamal Aljafari and Adam Shatz.” YouTube, 18 April 2025. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Edward W. Said, Preface to Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, Hamid Dabashi, ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 3. ↩︎
5. Fadi AbuNe’meh and Sima M, “Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance.” Senses of Cinema Issue 113 (May 2025). ↩︎