Dir. Kamal Aljafari
2015, Palestine, Germany and Lebanon, 70 min
Arabic and English with English subtitles
Co-presentation with the Winnipeg Film Group
Saturday, April 6 at 7:15 PM
Dave Barber Cinematheque (main floor, Artspace – 100 Arthur St., Winnipeg)
Recollection sees the filmmaker use Israeli and US feature films shot in Jaffa from the 60’s to the 90’s as the source found footage material, and removes all the protagonists, while leaving the traces of the original Palestinian community, centring the people who appeared in the films by chance in the background – what the filmmaker describes as cinematic justice. The film also serves as a way for the filmmaker to re-make his memories through a found archive, returning to a lost time.
“Kamal Aljafari’s experimental gesture is militant precisely because of the way he uses space. His intervention even in the space of the original films moves the city and its inhabitants from their positions in the background to the foreground of Aljafari’s work. The implicit reclaiming of space for the background is in keeping with the way the film credits are organized: neither the directors nor the titles of the original films are given, leaving space instead for the names of the previously marginalized people. Their history is told, and in the same gesture the places where these images were shot is described in a personal and poetic manner.” – Anaïs Farine, The Funambulist
Anaïs Farine, The Funambulist