Port of Memory

In 2006, Kamal Aljafari’s father installed a camera facing the street in order to catch the rascal who kept damaging his car. In this attempt, he films the whole neighbourhood, the comings and goings of the neighbours, the mundane dynamics of society. After his father’s death, the director constructs a narrative through these captured images, illustrating, narrating and contextualising life in Ramla, a Palestinian district in Israel nicknamed the “ghetto”. 

A collage of found footage that blurs the lines between reality and fiction, recreation and truth. Israeli military manoeuvres are decontextualised, and the footage makes us think about the double violence of war records and the link between the image and concrete reality.

Meditation and a familial and personal portrait. This documentary takes Kamal Aljafari, who lived in Germany at the moment, to visit relatives in Palestine. He walks through his father’s family’s Ramla and his mother’s family’s Jaffa, weaving the history of the country with that of his parents, the memories of 1948 with the conversations with his sister who, like him, also holds an Israeli passport. 

Archive images that fly over what is archaeological, natural, ancient and desert, contrasting with what is human, destructive, cultivating or just playful. The face of a changing geography, seen through the eye of aerial surveillance.