Our 63rd New York Film Festival Talks featured a special conversation with director Kamal Aljafari, moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish.

Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari has accumulated a remarkable body of work across the last two decades, employing thrilling experiments in moving image, sound, and archival material toward achieving what he describes as “the camera of the dispossessed.” His latest feature, NYFF63 official selection With Hasan in Gaza, uses MiniDV footage that Aljafari shot in the Palestinian city in 2001, while on a quest to find a man he had met briefly while imprisoned by Israeli forces as a teenager. The film’s haunting, elegiac quality comes not only from its poetic editing and sound design, but also from our awareness that all that we see on screen—already battered and destroyed by constant gunfire and bombing—is now long gone, and the circumstances in Gaza are even worse today. An in-depth conversation with Aljafari will cover his career, his influences and inspirations, and the making of his new film.

With Hasan in Gaza is now in theaters.

The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.