A Fidai Film: Screening and Discussion
Filmmaker and fellow Kamal Aljafari presents his documentary film, A Fidai Film (2024), which won the grand jury prize at the Visions du Réel. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Aljafari and the writer Adam Shatz.
A Fidai Film
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli Army seized a vast archive of photographs, films, and documents belonging to the Palestine Research Center in Beirut. In A Fidai Film, Aljafari excavates these buried images, transforming them into a counter-archive of resistance to dispossession and oblivion. Accompanied by Simon Fisher Turner’s soundtrack and texts by writers including the Palestinian fiction writer and spokesman Ghassan Kanafani, the film offers a treasure trove of footage about Palestinian life before and after the Nakba.
Kamal Aljafari , currently a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, is a filmmaker and artist. His work is largely affiliated with the world of documentary, although he employs a variety of different procedures and formats that position the visual arts in dialogue with the essay film and experimental cinema. Kamal’s work stems from a belief in and exploration of the power of cinema to bear witness. One of the hallmarks of his process lies in the manipulation of images in an attempt to extrapolate their figurative nature. Aljafari received an MFA from Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2003). His films have screened at festivals and museums worldwide, including Fondazione Prada, Tate Modern, Locarno Film Festival, Berlinale, London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Viennale, A Fidai Film (2024) was premiered at Visions du Reel where it received the grand jury prize, since then the film has been selected to numerous festivals earning the film 15 international awards. Retrospectives of his work were held at IndieLisboa and Anthology film Archives NY in 2024 and Documentamadrid in 2025. Kamal Aljafari has taught at The New School NY and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. He has received a fellowship from the Film Study Center-Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.
Adam Shatz, currently a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a visiting professor at Bard College. He holds a BA in history from Columbia University. Shatz is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar Straus & Giroux, January 2024), Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023), and Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel (Nation Books, 2004). His essays on culture and politics have appeared in the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, New York Times, and New York Times Magazine, among others. Shatz is a frequent host of the London Review of Books podcast, and the host of “Myself with Others”—a podcast about the life of ideas, featuring conversations with creative individuals in the arts, culture, and writing. In 2021, he was made a French Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et lettres for his writings on French culture.
