أول الرصاص، أول الحجارة
Notes on Camp

2026. 40 min. Essay film

​​​Notes on Camp interweaves multiple notions of return: a return to​​​ the​ camp, a return to revolutionary memory, a return of the dead. Through a non-linear epistolary structure, the film assembles video footage from different moments in time with archival imagery to take stock of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. Threaded through these images is the story of Ali’s assassination in 2023. Born, raised, and buried in the camp, Ali devoted his life to the Palestinian resistance until his martyrdom. Through the circumstances of his murder, the film’s narration moves across several decades of struggle, retracing trajectories of revolutionary figures whose lives and deaths continue to shape the living, the not-yet-dead, and those who inhabit the afterlife of revolution, while sustaining the material possibility of its return. One such figure is Abu Jihad, known as “the first of bullets, and the first of stones,” who was buried in the camp’s old cemetery in 1988. As the camera moves between the camp's old cemetery and the new one, where Ali rests, the film traverses and seeks to repair the several kilometers of ruins that both separate and connect the two cemeteries, while tracing the enduring histories of generations of martyrs inscribed in the shattered marble fragments of the decimated tombs.