Country: Palestine, Germany, France, UAE
Year: 2009
Duration: 63'
port of memory The Aljafari family is ordered to abandon their home in Ajami, a formerly affluent seaside neighborhood in Jaffa which has become a ghost city. They have no possibility or way to react to the injustice which throws their existence into chaos and each of them must face their new daily life as best they can. This leads to a reflection on the meaning of belonging and the concept of home and place that show the complexity and the paradoxical difficulty of being Palestinian in Israel; both present and absent, at the same time. “Since the ‘60s, Israeli and American films have been made in Jaffa but in Israeli films there are no Palestinians there and the Americans have used it to double as another location. I am showing the people that were never shown. As a Palestinian artist, I need to document these people’s lives. Their stories are important to tell. I tried to narrate my story within these parameters.”
Biography
film director
Kamal Aljafari
Kamal Aljafari (Ramallah, Palestine, 1972) graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and currently lives between Germany and Palestine. His first short film Visit Iraq (2003) received several awards, including the Sundance Documentary Fund Award and a nomination for Best German Short of the Year. His first feature film, The Roof (2006), won awards at the Images Festival in Toronto and at the FIDMarseille, and in 2010 he participated to the Torino Film Festival, presenting the documentary Port of Memory (2009). He has been teaching film studies at the New School in recent years, and he was head of the filmmaking department at the Deutche und Fernsehakademie in Berlin from 2011 to 2013.
FILMOGRAFIA
Visit Iraq (cm, doc., 2003), Al-sateh (The Roof, doc., 2006), Minaa elzakira (Port of Memory, doc., 2009), Recollection (doc., 2015).
Cast
& Credits
regia, sceneggiatura/director, screenplay
Kamal Aljafari
fotografia/cinematography
Jacques Besse
montaggio/film editing
Marie Hélène Mora
suono/sound
Gilles Laurent
interpreti/cast
Salim Bilbesi, Fatmeh Bilbesi, Sadika Bilbesi, Angel Hamati, George Khleifi, Ashraf Saqer
produttore/producer
Levon Melikian
produzione/production
Novelfilms, Mpm Film
coproduttori/coproducers
Kamal Aljafari, Zeljko Karajica, Marie Pierre Macia, Juliette Lepoutre
vendita all’estero/world sales
Pascale Ramonda
