In 1982, Israeli forces raided the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut and seized its archive — books, newspapers, audiovisual materials documenting Palestinian history. Most of it is believed to still be held by the Israeli army. Kamal Aljafari obtained some of that footage by clandestine means, and what he does with it in A Fidai Film is not simply show it. He makes it argue. The footage arrives already damaged — scratched, grainy, pixelated. Aljafari treats this damage not as deficiency but as testimony. The physical degradation of the image is itself evidence of the political suppression that caused it. A film about erasure arrives already partially erased, and that formal accident becomes the film's most powerful rhetorical move. Rather than imposing chronological order, Aljafari builds continuity through recurrence: torn-down houses, terrorised children, murdered bodies. British mandate-era black-and-white footage of soldiers patrolling and inflicting violence on the indigenous population cuts against later footage of Israeli forces committing similar acts. The editing does not argue with words — it argues with time, showing that the structure of the violence is older and more persistent than any single political moment. The film's most distinctive intervention is what Aljafari does with the Israeli authorities' pejorative captions imprinted on the original reels. He covers them with streaks of red paint — a gesture that is simultaneously an act of censorship and liberation — and replaces them with excerpts from poems by Palestinian writers including Ghassan Kanafani. The substitution is not subtle, but it doesn't need to be. The point is legibility: these images belong to a tradition of witness, not a catalog of enemy documentation. The title's meaning anchors everything. In Arabic, 'fidai' designates someone willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Aljafari applies the term to images — footage that has survived suppression and returns, scarred, to perform a kind of political self-sacrifice by being seen at all. It is a film about what captive archives can still do, which turns out to be quite a lot.
