‘RECOLLECTION - Kamal Aljafari’

The screening of Recollection is preceded by It's A Long Way from Amphioxus.

Recollection (Palestine/Allemagne, 2015, 70')
The Israeli and American features shot in the town of Jaffa from the sixties to the nineties are the basis for the story of a dream. All protagonists are removed from the original footage, leaving an empty setting formed by the town. Someone is returning to Jaffa, as he might to any place after a catastrophe. He knows everything. He is myself, my grandparents who were on their way to Beirut and returned because there was a storm, a photographer, a composite of every figure in the margins. Memory itself, filming. The memory of all the background it rescues from the screen.

It's A Long Way from Amphioxus (Allemagne, 2019, 17')
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.

Kamal Aljafari, born in Palestine in 1972, lives in Berlin. He works with moving and still images, interweaving between fiction, non-fiction, and art. Kamal’s past films include Recollection (2015), Port of Memory (2009), and The Roof (2006). He was a featured artist at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (NYC) and was a Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center.