The process of working with the archive brought him back to difficult memories of his own, including the years he spent in Israeli detention as a teenager. He said that once he began writing about those experiences, the personal and the collective collapsed into one. Gaza, he said, could be understood as a kind of prison, just as the one he knew at seventeen. Yet he chose not to narrate those memories in the film. Instead, he placed them quietly at the end as written text, allowing the images to speak first.
Unlike his earlier work, which relied heavily on montage, With Hasan in Gaza required almost no manipulation. “I did not even change the order of the shots,” he said. “It was already a documentation.” Sound and narration were the only additions. He avoided any new production entirely, convinced that adding layers risked erasing what the footage carried. “Any production is a new kind of erasure,” he said. He wanted the images to remain as they were found.
As the conversation deepened, he reflected on the way cinema responds to moments of rupture. For him, filmmaking still needs a measure of distance. It is not detachment but a way to preserve the complexity of the image. Many recent Palestinian films speak directly to the present moment. His chooses another path, one that engages critically with the image and the possibilities of cinematic language. “My work is different,” he said.
He also spoke about how audiences receive the film. He notices a surge of solidarity among young people, especially outside the region, but hopes for engagement that goes beyond symbols. He believes that approaching Palestinian cinema critically, reading more, understanding the different lived experiences and resisting the urge to celebrate every single work, is part of respecting its complexity.
For Aljafari, influences come from life as much as from cinema. Personal memories, literature, the years marked by imprisonment, the films and books absorbed across decades, all of it shapes his sensibility. His work resists the directness of journalistic storytelling and leans toward memory, poetry, and the quiet labor of the image.
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