Shown as part of London Short Film Festival
Now in its 17th year, the London Short Film Festival (10–19 January) once again wakes us up to a new year of film with a packed programme of work from all around the world. We are pleased to support the festival and look forward to the visit of Berlin-based Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, who will be discussing two experimental works that bear witness to the destruction, repopulation, and gentrification of Jaffa, a thriving Palestinian city before 1948.
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RECOLLECTIVE RESISTANCE Part 1: PORT OF MEMORY
Sunday 19 January 2020, 16:30 hrs
Part documentary, part fiction,
Port Of Memory reflects on the systematic erasure, colonial violence, and ethnic cleansing in Jaffa. In 1950, the state of Israel created the “Absentee’s Property Law”, implemented to seize Palestinian properties. “Absentees” are defined as those who fled to nearby villages during the 1947-48 massacres carried out by Zionist paramilitaries. These “absentees" intended to return; they were and continue to be denied this right. In this very personal work Kamal Aljafari follows the story of his family after they receive an order to evacuate their home.
France, Germany, Palestine 2009, 62 mins. With English subtitles.
RECOLLECTIVE RESISTANCE Part 2: RECOLLECTION
Sunday 19 January 2020, 18:30 hrs
Recollection comprises footage taken from Israeli and US films made in Jaffa between the 1960s and 1990s - some of the only films to have documented the city ahead of its ongoing destruction and redesign. Filming in Jaffa was needed for the propagation of Israel’s fictional history; this required the systematic erasure of Palestinian history.
In an act of resistance to this erasure, Aljafari repurposes found footage to re-narrate his city. He erases all actors, leaving the passers-by who appear in the margins of the frames. A visual tour around Jaffa, through rare archived footage that subtly depicts every house, road or square. A visual memory record of a city, people and parents in a city that was once known as the "Bride of the Mediterranean".
Palestine, Germany 2015, 70 mins. With English subtitles.
Kamal Aljafari, born in Palestine in 1972, lives in Berlin. He works with moving and still images, interweaving fiction, non-fiction, and art. His other films include
Visit Iraq (2003),
The Roof (2006),
Balconies (2007),
It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus (2019). He was a featured artist at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (NYC) and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center.
Both screenings have been programmed by guest curator Faye Harvey.
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