(Shorts 1)
Kamal Aljafari
Palestine, Germany
15’ | 2024
English
The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests.
This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
editing: Yannig Willmann
sound: Attila Faravelli
assistant director: Flavia Mazzarino
sound mixing: Jochen Jezussek
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.