In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and took advantage of the opportunity to seize the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. These archives contained many historical documents on Palestine, including a rich collection of photographs and films. These images have since been renamed and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the quiet violence of their authors), A Fidai Film offers a counter-narrative based on this loss, in order to restore the traces of the plundered Palestinian history. Kamal Aljafari re-examines these images, here exclusively cinematographic or televisual, and points out the complexity of their status as well as their mode of existence as a political object. A double movement unfolds, that of making these images resurface, sometimes precious testimonies restoring the life, the struggles of the Palestinian people, but also that of rethinking the implicit gaze of those who produced them (the colonial gesture). Kamal Aljafari kneads them, sometimes mistreats them, in order to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing gaze as well as the gestures of dispossession: crossing out the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British mandate to today), adding, colorizing, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining, editing. A gesture of anger and struggle in action as much as a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film claims to be a form of cinematographic sabotage, a combative film as the title unequivocally indicates. (Nicolas Feodoroff—FID)

The remarkable soundtrack of A Fidai Film is composed by sound artist Attila Faravelli, with additional music by Simon Fisher Turner. A substantial part of the soundtrack is based on an archeological exhumation and reworking of the sounds on the found tapes.

English subtitles