“Hafreiat,” the debut feature of Spanish filmmaker Alex Sardà, is a documentary of great stylistic discretion and a passionate, albeit noninvasive form of militancy. The director completely retreats into the shadows in order to watch how – paradoxically – under the scorching sun of the Jordanian desert, Abu Dya, a former common-law Palestinian inmate, digs out the earth of a Spanish archeological site. The impossibility of individual rehabilitation intertwines with the Global North’s impossibility of making amends to the Global South, and neocolonialism disguised as a civilizing endeavour of researching a past sufficiently remote to be unproblematic doesn’t go unnoticed by the protagonist, who incites his colleagues to go on strike. The clarity of his ideas, expressed with the same fierce energy that seems to run into his knotted worker’s body, along with the subtle survey of his family life, and preparation to become a father for the second time, endows the film with the political magnitude of the great classic humanist cinema. (Liri Chapelan)