Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
KAMAL ALJAFARI
November 9 – November 10
On the occasion of our week-long theatrical premiere run of Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari's A FIDAI FILM, we present screenings of all his previous single-channel works.
THE ROOF
2006, 61 min, digital
“This deceptively quiet film presents a portrait of Aljafari’s family in Ramleh and Jaffa that hovers between documentary and cinematic memoir, guided by a nimble camera moving calmly but ceaselessly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined. The title refers to the roof missing from the house where Aljafari’s family resettled in 1948, a home unfinished, an incomplete construction project. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari’s striking use of his ‘cast,’ his family, reveals the influence of Bresson’s use of nonprofessional actors as models whose performances emanate from their presence, not from acting.” –David Pendleton, HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
Preceded by:
BALCONIES
2007, 7 min, digital
“An experimental short film that looks at all the balconies left unfinished in director Kamal Aljafari’s hometown of Ramla, in the central district of Israel. What are we to think when, to paraphrase García Lorca, our home is no longer our home?” –INDIELISBOA
Sat, Nov 9 at 4:45.
PORT OF MEMORY
2009, 62 min, digital
“Walled-up houses, notice of expulsion, immobile consumers in a café, an eccentric individual driving round on his scooter shouting, a sick old woman and her daughter glued to a television set, stray cats, the anxiety of a couple tetanized by the somber certainties of the future, and to finish, a cemetery overlooking the sea and night drawing in on the terraces. The picture that Aljafari paints for us of Jaffa is that of a shrinking skin slowly closing in on its resigned inhabitants, who are crushed by fate, whatever they say about it, as if the slow-motion repetition of everyday gestures were their only way of suspending the course of time, of delaying the inevitable.” –Javier Packer y Comyn, CINÉMA DU RÉEL
Preceded by:
VISIT IRAQ
2003, 26 min, digital
A short film about the abandoned Iraqi Airways office in Geneva, VISIT IRAQ was made during Aljafari’s studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
Sat, Nov 9 at 6:30.
RECOLLECTION
2015, 70 min, DCP
“RECOLLECTION was inspired by a late-night TV encounter in a London hotel room. While flipping channels, Aljafari stumbled upon Menahem Golan’s THE DELTA FORCE (1986), about an elite counter-terrorism team rescuing hostages from kaffiyeh-clad terrorists in a Beirut played onscreen by Jaffa. As Chuck Norris sped through the streets, Aljafari noticed, in the background, someone he recognized from his youth. In his film, Aljafari collates images shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the ’90s, such as the bourekas films that often reinforced Zionist origin narratives and hero mythologies in their scenes of slapstick action, car chases, shootouts, and Arab-coded Mizrahi ‘thugs’ threatening Ashkenazi maidens. He then enacts what he describes as ‘cinematic justice,’ using digital software to erase the leading actors, and leaving only those figures who appear in the background.” –Kaleem Hawa, CINEMA SCOPE
Preceded by:
UNDR
2024, 15 min, digital
The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands of years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
Sun, Nov 10 at 4:00.
AN UNUSUAL SUMMER
2020, 80 min, digital
“Following an act of vandalism, the filmmaker’s father decides to install a surveillance camera to record the scenes unfolding in front of the house. Everyday family life, the neighbors going to work, and the children at school – AN UNUSUAL SUMMER captures fleeting moments of poetry whereas, in the background, the daily choreography of the Arab district – that some name the ‘ghetto’ – of Ramla, in current Israeli territory, comes to the surface. Composing with this visual material of low-definition aesthetics, finely punctuated with sound effects, Aljafari creates a mechanical diary of a life that scrolls past the window and succeeds with patience and infinite grace in transfiguring a ‘film à dispositif’ based on a security device into a personal and eminently political fresco.” –Emilie Bujès, VISIONS DU RÉEL
Preceded by:
IT’S A LONG WAY FROM AMPHIOXUS
2019, 16 min, digital
“An old woman leans to the young man with the yellow book sitting next to her and asks, ‘What are they distributing here?’ ‘Numbers’, he replies. In Berlin’s waiting rooms, where metal and wooden seats are nailed to the ground, people arrive after emerging from the seas. Here they wait. Aljafari’s new short film once again collapses time, questioning the meaning of life in a system in which humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways.” –BERLINALE
Sun, Nov 10 at 6:15.
