Free Virtual Screening of the Film “Recollection” by Palestinian Director Kamal Aljafari

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To view the film trailer please click here.

The following description is by Shimrit Lee writing for Warscapes.com

About the Film

Kamal Aljafari remembers when Jaffa was transformed into civil war-torn Beirut. Under the direction of Menachem Golan, the production team of The Delta Force (1986) created urban mayhem, arranging for the explosion of real buildings in the staging of a fictional battle. Aljafari recalls standing on the side of the road with a group of other children, eagerly awaiting a glimpse of Chuck Norris racing by in a van with the name of their school, “St. Joseph,” printed on the door. Years later, while flipping through television channels in a hotel room in London, Aljafari was shocked to recognize this scene. He sat on the bed mesmerized, not by the action shots but by the background: a clear documentation of the Jaffa of his childhood, a city which has since been destroyed, renovated, gentrified and rebuilt beyond recognition.

Aljafari’s latest film Recollection is composed entirely of footage from Israeli and American fiction features shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s, primarily of the so-called bourekas genre that dramatized tense romantic relationships between Mizrahi male “thugs” and Ashkenazi female elites. Jaffa provided the perfect setting to construct new Israeli narratives on top of emptied Palestinian ruins. As Aljafari explains, Palestinians were effectively “uprooted in reality and in fiction.” In Recollection, Aljafari removes the Israeli actors to give the stage to the people who appear by chance in the background of these shots, including both Palestinians and Iraqi Jews who were settled in the city, enacting what he describes as “cinematic justice.”

Aljafari was born in neighboring Ramle in 1972 and later emigrated to Germany to attend film school. His previous films include The Roof (2006), which follows him on a return visit to the homes of his parents and grandmother in Palestine, and Port of Memory (2009), which traces the eviction of his mother’s family from their home in Ajami. Aljafari’s dark humor and silent communication style liken his work to that of Palestinian filmmakers Elia Sulieman and Michel Khleifi.

Unlike his previous films, Recollection has no central protagonist. Aljafari moves through the found-footage, creating the illusion of a dreamer sleep-walking through the city with a handheld camera. While Aljafari sometimes describes this unseen cameraman as himself, each excavated memory is shared, belonging to his grandfather, his mother, his neighbors, and others who cannot return. Each footstep holds a certain urgency; as Aljafari explains, “I walk everywhere, sometimes hesitant and sometimes lost. I wander through the city; I wander through the memories. I film everything I encounter because I know it no longer exists. I return to a lost time.”