“The stretched-out temporality of With Hasan in Gaza embraces the tragic time loop in which Palestinians are trapped.”

This year’s Cannes Film Festival audiences were struck by two movies giving us indirect glimpses of the horror imposed on the inhabitants (or rather prisoners) of Gaza: Yes, in which Nadav Lapid places his main character on top of a hill overlooking the Strip and the smoke created by constant bombing; and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, whose director Sepideh Farsi serves as go-between in order to pass on to us the footage she received via WhatsApp from local photographer Fatima Hassouna – who was killed in an Israeli airstrike shortly after the film was completed. One year before, Journey Into Gaza by Piero Usberti created another type of disjunction, not in space but in time, in our perception of this afflicted place: shown after the beginning of the war on Gaza, it was shot before, when it was still possible for foreigners to enter the place, and for its inhabitants to live a pretense of a life. The same goes, over a longer span of time, for With Hasan in Gaza, putting together footage from tapes recorded back in 2001.

The story of the film starts even further in the past, as the person filming, Kamal Aljafari, entered Gaza in the hope of finding a man he met in an Israeli prison over a decade earlier, in 1989. Hence, the stretched-out temporality of With Hasan in Gaza embraces the tragic time loop in which Palestinians are trapped, going from one devastation to the next – the first intifada was ongoing in 1989, the second in 2001, and in 2025 there is no sign that the end of the current total destruction is in sight. Things can only, and will always, go worse; such seems to be the fatalist tenet of the film, whose very existence and form match the ongoing fate of Gaza and its people. What we see are pieces of a movie that was never made, in which the cutaway shots, showing a place and a people that do not exist anymore, take over from the stories that can never be told as they are constantly discontinued by the shooting and the shelling.

This pattern of perpetual demolition is ubiquitous in Palestinian documentaries, from 5 Broken Cameras (also edited from salvaged footage) to last year’s Academy Award winner No Other Land. The people Aljafari meets in With Hasan in Gaza state it bluntly: ‘this is not a life’, but a maddening Sisyphean cycle, as the opening movement of the film illustrates. The entry into Gaza gives an impression of serenity – one could almost call it bliss, compared to the horrific state the Strip is in now. Buildings are standing, cars are running, people go about their everyday lives and are even seen smiling as they walk on the beach. But it is not long before these peaceful slices of life are interrupted by visions of torn-down homes, and the sounds that come with them: bombs and gunshots fired randomly on residential areas, an ominous voice echoing from we-don’t-know-where and addressed to we-don’t-know-who.

In more recent films, the constant humming of drones adds itself to the list of strenuous noises, but With Hasan in Gaza shows how the ones inflicted twenty-five years ago, along with the fear of sudden and random death, and the rules enforced only to humiliate, already created back then a state of sub-humanity. ‘This is not a life’, indeed, but rather a lifetime sentence in a vicious jail. Another phrase we hear is ‘we are tired of talking’, since nobody listened then, and nobody is listening now. At one point, Aljafari reminisces about his reading of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. There is no better reference for the lasting dehumanizing effects of all the kinds of violence suffered by Palestinians both as individuals and as a society.