UNDR
Palestina, Germania / 2024 / 15′ / Inglese
ITALIAN PREVIEW

The camera’s eye obsessively returns to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, possession of archaeological sites, stones that have been lying in the desert for millennia. The places he observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, farmers working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the quiet of the place: explosions on land and sea set the stage for new cities with new names, new forests.
This landscape is transformed into a scene of appropriation.

Paradiso XXXI, 18
Palestine, Germany / 2022 / 18′ / Silent

«Nothing more can be heard; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are going straight into the world’s most gigantic display of soundproof fireworks, and we will soon drop our bombs».

An Unusual Summer
Palestine, Germany / 2020 / 80’ / Arabic, English

Following an act of vandalism, the director’s father decides to install a surveillance camera to record scenes taking place in front of the house. Everyday family life, neighbors going to work and children going to school, An Unusual Summer captures fleeting moments of poetry while, in the background, the daily choreography of the Arab neighborhood – which no one calls a “ghetto”- of Ramla, in present-day Israeli territory, emerges. Composing with this visual material a low-definition aesthetic, finely punctuated by sound effects, Kamal Aljafari creates a mechanical diary of a life that flows past the window and succeeds with patience and infinite grace in transfiguring a security device-based “film à dispositif” into a personal and eminently political fresco. «In the distant past, many years ago, in front of this house, there was a fig tree in a garden, which is now gone, razed in memory, swept away by History and Time».

Kamal Aljafari is a palestinian director. He attended the Academy of Multimedia Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin, Germany.
He has taught filmmaking at the New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. He was also a Film Study Center Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. In 2021 the Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival in Brazil dedicated the Focus section to his work.
His most recent work, UNDR, premiered at IFFR 2024.
He has just completed A Fidai Film and is preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

Filmography
A Fidai Film (2024)
UNDR (2024)
Paradiso XXXI, 108 (2022)
An Unusual Summer (2020)
Recollection (2015)
Port of memory (2010)
It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus (2019)
Balconies (2007)
The Roof (2006)
Visit Iraq (2003)