NZIFF Review: With Hasan in Gaza (2025)

REVIEW | ISSUE NINE | WHAKAKATA / HUMOUR

Written by Trevor Pronoso |  Letterboxd: @CleverGurl | Instagram: @trev.pro | Contributing Writer

With Hasan in Gaza (2025)

dir. Kamal Aljafari

France / Germany / Palestine / Qatar / Switzerland, 106 mins

Within the first 30 minutes of this film, I could already tell the differing cinematic temperaments of director Kamal Aljafari and his tour guide, Hasan Elboubou. Throughout With Hasan in Gaza, Kamal would often instruct Hasan to take the camera and film him speaking to a Gazan citizen, as well as the landscapes and people who happened to be walking past them. Kamal likes to shoot wide; he is conscious of composition, and on one occasion tells Hasan to position himself so the light can illuminate him clearly in the frame. Kamal aims for clarity with a poetic flourish. Despite most of the footage of Gaza's streets being captured from the window of a moving car, he leaves enough room for us to witness the setting sun from the highest point in Rafah, albeit flanked by border walls and internment camps in the foreground.

Hasan, on the other hand, constantly zooms in and out of what he's capturing on camera. If Kamal's tendencies lean into the frontality of the cinematic proscenium—the fixed, layered master shot—Hasan's gaze is frenetic, taking a 360° view from his position by frequently panning his camera to any points of interest that might seem lost or obfuscated to anyone lacking his life-long knowledge of Gaza's geography and its strategic territorial advancements by Israel. Kamal may film the rubble, but Hasan will zoom into the horizon and show you the guarded outpost where the IDF launches its 500-pound bombs onto the homes of families he's standing a few metres away from. He'll zoom into the gaping holes left by these shells on what's left of the concrete wall from the second floor of a building. But crucially, Hasan will zoom in on children playing in the sand from afar, crowding around the fish they caught by the shore, as Kamal talks to the children's father, asking him about the whereabouts of his long-lost friend.

Filming Palestine—much like the history of cinema—is always a matter of the master shot or the close-up. Sometimes the bigger picture is needed to contextualise how all the disparate elements you see on screen cohere into an emotional/intellectual/political framework ("mistaking the forest for the trees"); Sometimes the filmmaker/audience must take the first step of leaning in towards the finer details of reality and assert the following: "This is what's important, and nothing else." It doesn't matter if it's a forest or a tree; With Hasan in Gaza is here to tell us that they are burning, and it will keep burning if we continue to ignore the smoke rising above the master shot and the embers glowing within the close-ups of its tree trunks.