Kamal Aljafari

Port of Memory

 

ABOUT THE FILM

The history of the town of Jaffa, a thriving port city now part of Tel Aviv, provides the background for Aljafari’s most recent film, centering on his mother’s family at risk of eviction if they can’t find proof that the house they have lived in for decades belongs to them. Their predicament is rendered with Aljafari’s usual subtlety, as well as deadpan humor and dark wit. This skeletal narrative provides the scaffolding for a portrait of life in what was once a bustling neighborhood that was nearly emptied by fighting during the establishment of the state of Israel, and then suffered decades of official neglect. In the meantime, Jaffa was often used as a location for action adventure movies featuring the likes of Chuck Norris. While these films used the city as a generically exotic location, they have now become, in a neat bit of irony, the source of documentary images of the city as it was.

 
 
DOAN | Filmmakers
Kamal Aljafari
Kamal Aljafari

Kamal Aljafari is an internationally recognized filmmaker whose work searches for home while also questioning the boundaries between “documentary” and “fiction.” Blending a potent mix of personal ethics, transnational politics, and video and film aesthetics, Aljafari reinvents the long take, the slow tracking shot through space, and widescreen mise-en scene-once keynotes of European art cinema-in films where time and place take precedence over story and character. Aljafari’s films represent a new kind of domestic ethnography-“home movies” in which his family members come to represent all who wait, survivors of a decimated nation, forever looking for what has vanished, confined to an ever eroding domestic orbit, in a war with no end in sight.

 
 

Kamal Aljafari -- 62’, Arabic/Hebrew with English subtitles (Germany/France/UAE: 2009)

The Roof

 

ABOUT THE FILM

This deceptively quiet film presents a portrait of Aljafari’s family in Ramleh and Jaffa that hovers between documentary and cinematic memoir, guided by a nimble camera moving calmly but ceaselessly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined. The title refers to the roof missing from the house where Aljafari’s family resettled in 1948, a home unfinished, an incomplete construction project. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari’s striking use of his “cast,” his family, reveals the influence of Bresson’s use of nonprofessional actors as models whose performances emanate from their presence, not from acting.

 
 
DOAN | Filmmakers
Kamal Aljafari
Kamal Aljafari

Kamal Aljafari is an internationally recognized filmmaker whose work searches for home while also questioning the boundaries between “documentary” and “fiction.” Blending a potent mix of personal ethics, transnational politics, and video and film aesthetics, Aljafari reinvents the long take, the slow tracking shot through space, and widescreen mise-en scene-once keynotes of European art cinema-in films where time and place take precedence over story and character. Aljafari’s films represent a new kind of domestic ethnography-“home movies” in which his family members come to represent all who wait, survivors of a decimated nation, forever looking for what has vanished, confined to an ever eroding domestic orbit, in a war with no end in sight.

 
 

Kamal Aljafari -- 61’, Arabic/Hebrew with English Subtitles (Germany: 2006)