Port of Memory + UNDR

Two films by Kamal Aljafari

Port of Memory:

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 frozen by the sombre certainties of the future, and to finish, a cemetery overlooking the sea and night drawing in on the terraces. The picture that Kamal Aljafari paints for us of the Palestinian city 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 at Centre Pompidou, 2010)

UNDR:

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.