33° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
TFFDOC/INTERNAZIONALE.DOC

RECOLLECTION

RECOLLECTION
by Kamal Aljafari
Country: Germany, Palestine
Year: 2015
Duration: 70'


The town of Jaffa, Palestine, from the 1960s to the 1990s, captured on film in Israeli and American features. All the protagonists are edited out of the original footage; in the images of the extras and the people passing by, the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari looks for the history of a place that no longer exists, but from which he came from.

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).

Declaration

film director

“I spent many years collecting the Israeli and American fiction films shot in Jaffa, most of them the so-called Israeli Burekas Films on the impossible Ashkenazi/Mizrahi (Western/ Oriental) relationship in Israel’s first decades. Jaffa is overwhelmingly the most present set for these. They are, ironically, the only films to document the city before its destruction – even while they were the actors of its destruction, film after film, box-office hits molding not only the Israeli, but also the US imaginary.”

Cast

& Credits

regia, fotografia, produttore/director, cinematography, producer
Kamal Aljafari
montaggio/film editing
Kamal Aljafari, Daniel Franke
suono/sound
Jacob Kirkegaard, Gilles Benardeau 


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