In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded southern Lebanon and reached West Beirut, where the Palestinian Research Center had built up an extensive archive of photographs, films and documents since 1965. This archive was taken as spoils of war.

With this event as a starting point, Kamal Aljafari constructs an alternative Palestinian visual memory, which he calls “the camera of the dispossessed”. A Fidai Film is a unique mix of found footage and experimental cinema, with collage-like elements that dance around mourning and resistance.

The film shows rare moving images of Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, accompanied by a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by Palestinian writer Gassan Kanafani (1936-1972), among others. Aljafari poetically interweaves history with art, grief with longing, resistance with sabotage. Every image, every montage, bears the traces of this rich, layered mix of personal and collective memories.