Thursday,
April 15, 2010
An
Evening with Kamal Aljafari
Co-presented
by Haverford College and the Cinema Studies Program and the
Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania
Kamal
Aljafari is a filmmaker and visual artist who graduated from
the Kunsthochschule fur Medien (Academy of Media Arts) in Cologne,
Germany. His films include the short Visit
Iraq (2003) and the award-winning The
Roof (2006), a quiet, personal testament to the
history and daily oppression of Palestinians living in Israel.
The Roof won the Best International
on Screen (Video) Award at the Images Festival in Toronto and
the award for best soundtrack at the FID Marseille documentary
festival in France. All Aljafari’s films screened at the 2009
Flaherty Seminar where he was a featured artist.
Visit
Iraq
dir. Kamal Aljafari, Germany, 2003,
26 mins, video,
color,
English, Arabic and French w/ English subtitles
A
humorous look at the rumors surrounding an Iraqi Airways agency
in Geneva, which has remained mysteriously abandoned since 1990.
followed
by
The
Roof
dir. Kamal Aljafari, Palestine,
2006, 61 mins, video, color, English, Arabic and Hebrew
w/ English subtitles
"An
eloquent and understated exploration of physical and psychic
place in the context of Palestinian filmmaker Aljafari’s family
history. Returning to his parents’ and grandmother’s homes in
Ramla and Jaffa, now part of Israel, Aljafari uses elegant cinematography,
unhurried rhythms, and fragmented narrative to convey how space,
time, and history have been molded by politics and Israeli institutionalized
neglect. The roof of the title is an absent one, on the unfinished
house where his family has lived since their resettlement in
1948, and it functions as a place of waiting marked by constant
deferral." – Irina Leimbacher
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