Confronting the Empire: militant archival practices in Testimonies from Fallujah and A Fidai Film

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Date
2025-10-23
Authors
Alvarez, Pablo
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Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
Published Version
10.33178/alpha.2930.14
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Abstract
This essay explores the appropriation and creative interpretation of audiovisual archives in cinematic representations of the Iraq war and the Israel/Palestine conflict. It showcases the political possibilities of imperial archives in Testimonies from Fallujah (Hamodi Jasim, 2004) and A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari, 2024), two medium-length compilation films that repurpose American and Israeli hegemonic media and fictional footage. Despite their historical, geopolitical, and production differences, the two films share a similar engagement with and against the imperial film and media archive. This essay examines the two films’ archival practices. It argues that the reuse of imperial materials in Testimonies from Fallujah and A Fidai effectively disputes underlying imperial discourses and structures of power in the mediation and filmic representation of the Iraq war and the conflict in Palestine.
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Keywords
Militant filmmaking , Imperial archives , Appropriation , Iraq , Palestine
Citation
Alvarez, P. (2025) 'Confronting the Empire: militant archival practices in Testimonies from Fallujah and A Fidai Film', Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 29–30, pp. 236–245. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.2930.14
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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/18184
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Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Issue 29-30: Coming to Latin America: Moving Image Encounters, Non-Latin American Practitioners
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© 2025, the Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.