In Morocco this year, I met an old communist who organized the ciné-clubs in Casablanca. He remembers receiving the reels for Borhane Alaouié’s films, among them, Beirut, The Encounter (1981) and It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor (1978). But it was Kafr Kassem that loomed largest in his mind.

To return to it fifty years after its release and almost seventy years since the eponymous massacre is to be marked by the weight of synchronic catastrophe in Palestine. That day, men and women were summarily executed by Israeli forces attempting to complete the ethnic cleansing of the dakhil that had begun during the Nakba. “We acted like Germans,” one of the soldiers recalled, a phrase echoed in Basil al-Araj’s detailing of the excruciating testimonies from the al-Dawayima massacre of 1948.

Thus, we are confronted by the transhistorical familiarity of Zionist annihilation, now reprised daily in Gaza. While Palestinian history is often periodized by these moments, Kafr Kassem was revelatory in its insistence on the interstices of our stories, the film staging the Syrian village of al-Shaykh Saad as occupied Palestine to portray snippets of the forty-nine lives that were taken in October 1956. — KALEEM HAWA