Kamal Aljafari

Three MiniDV tapes of life in Gaza from 2001 were recently rediscovered. What started as a search for a former prison mate from 1989 led to an unexpected road trip from the north to the south of Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown.

"Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world's biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs."

In what is left of the city of Jaffa, a man about to lose his house contemplates his fate. Meanwhile two women remain tied to their homes. Cats scrabbling her front door, one finds solace feeding her old mother, until her house is taken over by an Israeli film crew. The other immerses herself in dreams of love whilst making wedding decorations. In a nearby café an old captain sits motionless the whole day through, while another man moves restless like a fish in an aquarium. For these Palestinian characters this is a way of life, holding onto hope through their own rituals.

Essay film about Jaffa's history as told by mainstream films.

A helicopter sweeps the desert, surveying a land at once ancient and modern, natural and built. Farmers work their fields, children play and bells sound a call to prayer. Dynamite ruptures the earth. UNDR is a poignant found-footage essay film about an otherworldly landscape charged with history and potential that has become an eerie site of surveillance and incursion.

This deceptively quiet film presents a portrait of Aljafaris 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 Aljafaris 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. Aljafaris striking use of his cast, his family, reveals the influence of Bressons use of nonprofessional actors as models whose performances emanate from their presence, not from acting.

Following an act of vandalism, the Palestinian filmmaker's father decides to install a surveillance camera to record the scenes unfolding in front of the house. Everyday family life, or neighbours going to work, Unusual Summer captures fleeting moments of poetry whereas, in the background, the daily choreography of Ramla, located in today's Israël, comes to the surface.

An experimental meditation focusing on the deteriorated and unfinished balconies of the home town of Kamal Aljafari, Ramla, and inspired by Romance sonámbulo by Federico García Lorca: "But now I am no longer me, and my house is no longer my House…"

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, 'A Fidai Film' aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.

Kamal Aljafari’s short film once again collapses time, questioning the meaning of life in a system in which humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways. Step into this black hole, where bones and flesh have become numbers in a queuing system. This surreal film observes the origins of our being versus the future of how we are defined. What have we become from our point of origin until today’s chaos of bureaucratic mazes? It’s a long way from Amphioxus, we all came from there.

A poetic documentary on the abandoned agency of the airline company Iraqi Airways in Geneva.

A young woman is the embodiment of an abandoned cinema, watching and being watched all along.