A Fidai Film

+ Short film:
Control Anatomy
2025, Palestine, 17 min., Mahmoud Alhaj, Arabic

The word Fidai means freedom fighter or guerrilla. In this sense, the film itself becomes a guerrilla, resisting dominant cinematic forms and institutional narratives. During the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Palestine Research Center in Beirut was attacked. Its archives were looted and destroyed, erasing not just documents and footage, but a cultural memory.

Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film emerges from this absence. Using fragments of stolen, scattered images, it builds a counter-archive,defying colonial erasure through the quiet force of imagery. Without slogans or speeches, the film reclaims memory through form; each frame becomes an act of resistance.

Mahmoud Alhaj’s Control Anatomy complements this with a stark meditation on surveillance. Told in chapters with narration, it explores how technology maps, monitors, and disciplines the Palestinian body. Silence becomes its own language, echoing the muted existence under occupation.

Together, these films speak to the violence of forgetting. They don’t offer closure but create space for mourning, remembering, and resisting. Here, cinema is not just a medium of expression; it is defiance made visible. From fragments and ruins, a fugitive archive rises – asserting presence where erasure was intended.