Synopsis
In Berlin’s immigration waiting rooms and within the rows of wooden seats nailed to the ground await the people who are arriving from the seas. Here they wait. This short film questions the meaning of life within a system where humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways. How do the origins of our being diverge from 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.
Director: Kamal Aljafari
Producers: Kamal Aljafari, Sheyma Buali
Language: German with English subtitles
Country: Germany
Duration: 15 min
2019
Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari studied at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and currently lives in Berlin. He has taught filmmaking at The New School (New York) and the DFFB (Berlin). He is a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination of Columbia University. In May 2024, IndieLisboa dedicated a retrospective to his work. In 2024 his film UNDR was selected at IFFR and A Fidai Film at Visions du Réel, where it won the Grand Jury Prize Burning Lights Competition. Aljafari is currently working on a fiction film, “Beirut 1931”, to be shot in Jaffa.