Recollection

Kamal Aljafari, 2015, 70′

In Arab, with English subtitles

This film is part of The Skin of the World, Courtisane Festival 2024

For many years, Kamal Aljafari has been collecting Israeli and Hollywood fiction films shot in his hometown Jaffa. These are films in which Palestinians are absent, yet they exist at the edges of the frames, visible only in traces and shadows. Further preserved in this archive is a city; its gradual dismantling over the decades chronicled film by film. From the footage of dozens of films, Aljafari has excavated a whole community and recreated the city from his youth, before its destruction by colonization and prior to the settlement projects.

Kamal Aljafari’s cinema presents chapters of an unfinished story, all at once personal and communal. The Palestinian director and artist, born in the city of Ramla, in 1972, and based in Germany for years, has created a poetic filmography marked by restlessness, devising an elaborate mise-en-scene with different modes of resistance against the systematic attempts to destroy subjects, places, and the symbolic field that attest to a Palestinian existence. Over the course of his almost two-decade career, the filmmaker has undertaken a thorough investigation into the forms and politics of images amidst their power games, about what is seen and what has been made invisible, among material and memorial ruins interpolated in the editing room.

The film of Kamal Aljafari will be shown together with ‘The Lake and The Lake’ by Sindhu Thirumalaisamy. After the screening of the two films there will be a conversation with Kamal Aljafari. This film screening is part of the programme section ‘The Skin of the World. Propositions for a Cinema of Resonance’, which is part of Courtisane festival 2024.

* Followed by a conversation with Kamal Aljafari