Port of Memory + UNDR

Two films by Kamal Aljafari

Port of Memory
Palestine / 2009 / 62:00

UNDR
Palestine / 2024 / 15:00

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 Jaffa the Palestinian 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.


Kamal Aljafari: Amidst fragments of memories and images of a people beset with the insignia of erasure, 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.