Locarno Festival

'With Hasan in Gaza', a powerful documentary in competition at Locarno

Shortlisted for the Golden Leopard, Kamal Aljafari's film is a cinematic reflection on memory

8 August 2025

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The eye of the camera becomes the witness of an extremely difficult situation: this is one of the possible ways to summarise 'With Hasan in Gaza', a deeply committed film, presented in competition at Locarno.

A documentary by Kamal Aljafari, the film starts with the discovery of three MiniDV tapes on life in Gaza that have recently come to light. What starts out as the search for a former cellmate from 1989 turns into an unexpected journey from the north to the south of Gaza together with Hasan, a local guide of whom nothing is known.

It is not only the current situation involving Gaza and its population that makes this vision particularly interesting: the film is in fact a cinematic reflection on memory and loss in general, through a Gaza that has now disappeared.

If the entire journey is designed to find a friend whose trail has been lost, this cue seems to be a metaphor for the entire film, which focuses on showing different lives that may have been lost forever.

Also thanks to the amateurish, close-to-the-family-film style of filming, one has the feeling of being confronted with an intimate product that is able to tell in a direct way what has happened (and is happening) within the city.

A tribute to Gaza and its people

Kamal Aljafari wanted to describe his film with these words: 'a homage to Gaza and its people, to all that has been wiped out and that within me has awakened at this dramatic moment of the existence, or non-existence, of Palestine. A film about catastrophe and poetry that resists'.

In this mixture of catastrophe and poetry, 'With Hasan in Gaza' is a product with a strong impact, which has in a night sequence, in which we observe from a window a situation that is as usual as it is disturbing, its climax.

The only limitation of this important operation is that it does not always fully trust the images and sometimes brings in words - as in the conclusion - without really needing them.

It should be noted that the film is co-produced by four countries: Palestine, Germany, France and Qatar.

Alpha

Out of Competition was 'Alpha' by Julia Ducournau, a film that had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and arrived in Locarno accompanied by its actress Golshifteh Farahani, who received the Davide Campari Excellence Award.

The protagonist is Alpha, a thirteen-year-old girl who lives alone with her mother. A tattoo on her arm, done light-heartedly at a party, is about to turn her life upside down: a new and ruthless virus that is transmitted through blood has just appeared, and Alpha, injured, becomes a potential danger in the eyes of others.

Four years after winning the Palme d'Or with 'Titane', Julia Ducournau signs another undoubtedly courageous and ambitious product. However, there is far too much at stake - from drug addiction to the fear of contagion that recalls the nightmare of AIDS, to the problematic vision of adolescence - and the French director struggles to give balance to the screenplay and effectively pull the strings of the discourse.

Clunky and unresolved, 'Alpha' becomes increasingly dull as the minutes pass and, despite a sometimes captivating staging, ends up being a missed opportunity. There are good performances by the aforementioned Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim, but they are not enough.

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