With Hasan in Gaza

It is 2001 in Gaza, and Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Kamal Aljafari is traveling from north to south, accompanied by a MiniDV camera and searching for a man he met while briefly imprisoned as a teenager. Aljafari’s footage, now nearly a quarter-century old and unseen by the filmmaker himself until recently, is often tranquil and languid: drives down the highway, walks through the market, a trip to the beach, a card game among friends. But the immediate return of Israeli shelling, captured here in detail, invokes the ever-present background of settler violence. With Hasan in Gaza is an aching witness to the beauty of that land and the struggle of its people, neither of which may soon be recognizable at all.