23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

Filters

Filters

Honouring the cinematographic work of Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari

Retrospective Kamal Aljafari

Honouring the cinematographic work of Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari

A Fidai Film

A film that rebels against the theft of memories, especially when it comes to a country’s literary, and historical archives. Kamal Aljafari brings us the Israeli incursion into the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut, in the summer of 1982. This example is not unique; it has been happening since 1948. When there is an occupation, there is a desire to disconnect from the past, to replace memories, to erase history. This film says “no” to that gesture.

Palestine / Germany / Qatar / Brazil / France

2024, 78'

An Unusual Summer

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”.

Palestine / Germany

2020, 80'

Balconies

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?

Germany / Switzerland

2003, 13'

It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus

Moments that should be more human are pierced by time-consuming and dehumanising bureaucracy, turning people into numbers and their life stories into mere statistics. In the waiting rooms of Berlin’s immigration institutions, everything is reduced to something sterile and lacking in empathy.

2019, 16'

Paradiso, XXXI, 108

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.

Palestine / Germany

2022, 18'

Port of Memory

The port is Jaffa, and the protagonists are Palestinians who are waiting for the inevitable, namely the imminent expulsion, like an alarm clock in the morning, by the Israeli authorities. In a place that is being forcibly transformed, the only weapons left are the daily rituals that make those who live there human.

Palestine / Germany / France

2009, 62'

Recollection

Kamal Aljafari takes Israeli and American films (there was a Chuck Norris in between), shot between 1960 and 1990, to recover the port city of Jaffa from its gaze. The protagonists are removed and all that remains are the places, the houses, the roads. What was invisible is now in the foreground. Editing as political activism.

Palestine / Germany / Lebanon

2015, 70'

The Roof

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.

Palestine / Germany

2006, 61'

UNDR

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.

Palestine / Germany

2024, 15'

Visit Iraq

The offices of the Iraqi Airways in Geneva have been abandoned due to the embargo on the country in the 1990s. But the place remains, like a haunting ghost, with all the elements of the time. Neighbours are interviewed and fears and fantasies are revealed.

Germany / Switzerland

2003, 26'