The Israeli and American features shot in the town of Jaffa from the 60s to the 90s are the basis for the story of a dream. All protagonists are removed from the original footage, leaving an empty setting formed by the town. Thus, the impossible is made possible from the ‘I’ perspective, namely filming the past and compiling a picture album made of memories. Preserved also is a city, alive again in moving images. Its gradual destruction over the decades is chronicled by film, excavating a whole community and recreating the city. Aljafari erased the actors, photographed the backgrounds and the edges; and made the passersby the main characters of this film. He finds his way from the sea, walks everywhere, sometimes hesitant and sometimes lost. He wanders through the city and memories filming everything he encounters because he knows it no longer exists. He returns to a lost time.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Kamal Aljafari and Akram Zaatari.

KAMAL ALJAFARI

Kamal Aljafari’s filmography includes ‘Recollection’ (2015), ‘Port of Memory’ (2009) and ‘The Roof’ (2006). In 2009/2010 he was the Benjamin White Whitney Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center. He taught at New School (New York, 2010), and at the German Film and Television Academy (Berlin, 2011-2013) where he also served as head of directing program.

AKRAM ZAATARI

An artist and filmmaker, Zaatari’s practice is tied to collecting. He is deeply invested in researching photographic practices particularly in the Middle East, examining how photography served to shape notions of aesthetics, postures and social codes. Zaatari has been focusing since 1999 on the archive of Studio Shehrazade in Saida studying the work of photographer Hashem el Madani as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices.