Please join us for film screenings of Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari, currently a Benjamin White Whitney Scholar and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow.
| An Evening with Kamal Aljafari
Special Event Tickets $12
THE ROOF & PORT OF MEMORY Friday April 9 at 7pm The haunting films of Kamal Aljafari (b. 1972) mix documentary, fiction and personal memoir to render complex portraits of the Palestinian communities in Ramleh and Jaffa, now part of Israel. While providing a rare look at the everyday lives of Palestinian Israelis, the films are more than simply sociopolitical treatises of often-overlooked communities and neighborhoods in danger of dissolving. Aljafari instead astutely balances fiction and nonfiction to capture the fragile rhythms of lives lived in a kind of permanent displacement and the strange limbo of neighborhoods subtly yet inexorably transforming. Although the Ramleh and Jaffa depicted in Aljafari’s films have managed to avoid the raw hardships of life in the occupied territories, they cannot avoid the paradoxes of the occupation itself, filed as they are with lives and buildings frozen in time even as they are part of the Israeli present. Pointedly political, Aljafari’s films wonderfully embed their ideology into a cinematic poetry graced by light humor. Aljafari has established an international reputation not only with his films but also with gallery shows exhibited around the world. A graduate of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, this year he has been based at Harvard as a Film Study Center-Radcliffe Fellow. He has an installation opening on April 28th at the Radcliffe Gallery entitled “Not Without Me.” This screening is presented by the Harvard Film Archive, the Boston Palestine Film Festival and the Film Study Center, Harvard. See below for details of films screened, or visit the HFA website. Screenings are followed by a reception with the filmmaker |
