To what extent can the real and figural materiality of an image become an abstraction or, potentially more, a spectrum? The question evokes both aesthetic and ethical problems which, in Kamal Aljafari’s cinema, converge towards a territory as real as it is abstract and phantasmagorical: Palestine. While Aljafari’s cinema stems from the observation of an everyday life that not only coexists within, but inhabits ruin itself, he subsequently transforms these images into trails, echoes, smudges, blurs and, in his most radical recent films, pixels uncapturable by notions of the real.

The art of transforming the harrowing materiality of broken walls and destroyed terraces of an invaded territory into a disembodied immateriality is the art of reconfiguring Palestine as a nation, which through moving images ultimately surpasses the forces that imprison and destroy that space. An act of defiance. In Aljafari’s cinema, Palestine becomes a shadow that runs faster than the body from which it emanates.

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.

Balconies (7 minutes)
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...”

UNDR (15 minutes)
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 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

Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (21 minutes 50 seconds)
How to express what is absent, marginalised and made to disappear through the use of violence? Kamal Aljafari’s work has been revolving around this basic constellation of memory politics for years. In the shots of an elaborately staged Israeli army propaganda film from the 1970s, condensed into frenzied cascades of images, Palestine, imagined solely as a battlefield, once again becomes “a shadow that runs faster than the body that belongs to it”.

It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus (16 minutes)
An old woman leans to the young man with the yellow book sitting next to her and asks, “What are they distributing here?” “Numbers”, he replies. In Berlin’s waiting rooms, where metal and wooden seats are nailed to the ground, people arrive after emerging from the seas. Here they wait. Kamal Aljafari’s new 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.

All ticket sales going to Palestine Red Crescent Society.

Artwork Katie Waite

+ Stick around for a post screening friendly group conversation. Just to share thoughts and feelings around how this year has been for us regarding our solidarity with Palestine.

Timings

19:30 - Doors open
20:00 - Screening starts (Runtime 60min)
21:00 - Friendly group conversation (30min)

Be sure to also attend Kamal Aljafari's screening of his latest work 'A Fidai Film' at the CUBE in January.