RECOLLECTION
by Kamal Aljafari
2015, 70 min, DCP

“RECOLLECTION was inspired by a late-night TV encounter in a London hotel room. While flipping channels, Aljafari stumbled upon Menahem Golan’s THE DELTA FORCE (1986), about an elite counter-terrorism team rescuing hostages from kaffiyeh-clad terrorists in a Beirut played onscreen by Jaffa. As Chuck Norris sped through the streets, Aljafari noticed, in the background, someone he recognized from his youth. In his film, Aljafari collates images shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the ’90s, such as the bourekas films that often reinforced Zionist origin narratives and hero mythologies in their scenes of slapstick action, car chases, shootouts, and Arab-coded Mizrahi ‘thugs’ threatening Ashkenazi maidens. He then enacts what he describes as ‘cinematic justice,’ using digital software to erase the leading actors, and leaving only those figures who appear in the background.” –Kaleem Hawa, CINEMA SCOPE

Preceded by:
UNDR
2024, 15 min, digital
The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands of years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.