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RECOLLECTION

Commemorating 75 years of Nakba: In partnership with ALFILM – Arab film festival Berlin
Kamal Aljafari, Palestine/Germany/Lebanon 2015, 70 Min., OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Kamal Aljafari

Commemorating 75 years of Nakba, ALFILM – Arab film festival Berlin in partnership with Sinema Transtopia will be screening the experimental film RECOLLECTION by Kamal Aljafari on Nakba Day – Monday, May 15th –  in Sinema Transtopia.

The Israeli and American features shot in the town of Jaffa from the 60s to the 90s provided the perfect setting to construct new Israeli narratives on top of emptied Palestinian ruins. In Kamal Aljafari’s film, they are the basis for the history of a dream. All protagonists are removed from the original footage, leaving an empty setting formed by the town and its indigenous inhabitants. In this process, the film makes Palestinians that were uprooted in reality and in fiction, visible. The impossible is thus made possible from the “I” perspective, namely filming the past and compiling a picture album made of memories.

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. He attended the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin. He has taught filmmaking at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, Berlin. He was also a Film Study Center Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. In 2021 Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival in Brazil devoted its Focus Section to his work. His most recent work, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, premiered at Corti d'Autore, in Locarno Film Festival 2022. He is currently completing “A Fidai Film”, and preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.