UNDR (Kamal Aljafari, 2024)
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Taking into account the ideas that have driven the Human Rights Film Festival since its inception in 2002, it would be surprising if its 22nd edition (December 2–7, 2024) did not address, in some form, the current events unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank. When announcing the December program, director and chief selector Petar Milat highlighted the long-standing presence of the Palestinian question within the festival’s thematic framework. However, he noted that this usually involved giving visibility to Israeli dissident perspectives. For a change, the latest edition of the HRFF spotlighted the work of Kamal Aljafari, a Palestinian author of international renown.
It is also worth mentioning that Israeli-Palestinian relations were explored in another film presented at this year’s HRFF–Israel-Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 (2024) by Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson, an ambitious 200-minute compilation of television reports broadcast between 1958 and 1989.
Aljafari is not only a Palestinian filmmaker by origin. His oeuvre is deeply rooted in the Palestinian experience of historical erasure from generationally inhabited lands, often intertwined with the director’s personal and familial experiences. Thus, Aljafari’s filmography is Palestinian in its themes and ethics—a cinema of conflicting images. At the same time, as noted by Peter Limbrick, Aljafari’s work is also transnational, shaped within the conditions of international productions, primarily linked to Germany. Aljafari studied in Cologne and lived in Berlin until his recent relocation to Paris.
This edition of the HRFF excluded only two of Aljafari’s films from his retrospective: his debut Visit Iraq (2003), about the abandoned offices of Iraq Airways in Geneva, and Balconies (2007), which focuses on the unfinished and aesthetically peculiar balconies in his hometown of Ramle. However, even without these idiosyncratic works—the first addressing broader perceptions of the Middle East in the West, and the second being Aljafari’s least narrative film—the retrospective overall comes across as impressive.
The feature-length The Roof (2009) begins with the director conversing with his younger sister living in Jerusalem and planning to graduate in law and eventually pass her judicial exam, a context revealed only later. Facing each other in the dim light by the rain-soaked window, they recall Aljafari’s six-month imprisonment. “As time passes, you have your own life,” he remarks at one point, reflecting on leaving such a past behind. This sentiment applies to other stories in the film, including those of Aljafari’s parents and grandparents, whose tragedies date back to the establishment of Israel in 1948. The destruction of Jaffa on one side and Ramle on the other irreversibly changed the lives of these cities’ inhabitants. Aljafari’s family history is particularly striking for Western audiences: while Palestinian, they are also Christians. The house at the center of The Roof was allocated to them after the expulsion of Muslim residents in 1948—a relatively fortunate outcome for just 600 families in the area, as Aljafari has detailed in interviews.
Palestinian Christians are the world’s oldest Christian community, and Palestine itself has long been a space of coexistence among diverse groups and occupations. Aljafari’s perspective is crucial as it highlights that Palestinian identity is not purely ethnic. Furthermore, in the early 20th century, there were also Palestinian, or so-called Arab Jews in Palestine—a fact often overlooked. One should also not forget The Samaritans in the North nor that many Christians had leadership roles in the Arab nationalist movement, joined as well by numerous Jews before the 1948 colonization. All of this adds layers of complexity to the oversimplified image of the region often presented in the West.
The Roof portrays Ramle as a vital cultural and transportation hub where the Arab and Christian populations have significantly declined. The grim realities of life for the remaining non-Jewish residents are reflected in long panoramic shots of Hebraized exteriors (street names have been extensively changed), while the interior of the Aljafari family home stands as an unusual oasis. Here, during the turbulent 2000s, the TV set holds a central place, similar to its role in Abbas Fahdel’s Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015). One intriguing subplot involves Aljafari’s friend, accused of planning a terrorist attack when attempting to cross into Jordan, with whom the director reconnects over the phone. The Roof is also marked by a series of car-shot scenes, particularly along the internationally unrecognized separation line between East and West Jerusalem—moving through this zone is an unsettling exposure to constant surveillance and control.
Port of Memory (2010) functions as a docufiction, offering a feature-length portrait of a family caught between two worlds, effectively continuing the narrative initiated in The Roof. Once again, the story revolves around a house, laced with deadpan humor and paradoxes reminiscent of fellow Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman. Targeted by Israeli expansion efforts, the Palestinians in the film find various neurotic outlets—obsessively washing their hands, resorting to dissociation, etc. The source of their inner conflict is the inability to prove ownership of the house they inhabit, which the Israelis plan to seize without much resistance. Aljafari’s family is repeatedly visited, questioned about whether the house is for sale, and pressured about when it might be. Palestinian everyday life remains fraught and stifled. The connection between the Christian presence in Palestine and the conditions of contemporary occupation is creatively drawn through a television documentary about Jesus Christ, watched as a cat lounges above the screen. The narration about Jesus continues as the film shifts to shots of the modern environment, showing settlers carving highways through the land and reshaping it for a new way of life.
In Recollection (2015), for the first time, Aljafari’s material does not originate from his own footage but from archival clips of films shot in Jaffa. This marks the beginning of his ongoing fascination with archives. Aljafari grew up in Jaffa, attending Catholic school, and his family has ties to the city. The archival clips, drawn from films made between the 1930s and the early 1990s—including one starring Chuck Norris—are reassembled into a feature-length study. During this period, Jaffa served as a backdrop for many foreign and Israeli productions, doubling as various Middle Eastern locations. Unlike cities like Beirut, Jaffa, once a significant Arab cultural hub and the origin of the world-famous Jaffa oranges, offered the safety needed for investment and film projects.
However, the optimism surrounding Jaffa also had a darker side that Recollection seeks to reconstruct. Aljafari uncovers footage of a local Christian church’s interior, mosque minarets and courtyards, and Arabic street name signs—cultural markers that have since been systematically erased. The camera’s intermittent focus on architectural details or passersby evokes a nostalgic reading of Jaffa’s unconscious through fiction films. Referencing Jean-Luc Godard’s observation about the historical conditions that made Israelis subjects of fiction and Palestinians subjects of documentary, Aljafari repurposes existing footage as a subversive tool for representing those who have been systematically erased. In the film’s final third, images of Jaffa’s modernist transformation accelerate, accompanied by a rising cacophony, as if the archives are urgently addressing the audience. The climax features a car chase set to action-movie music.
The 15-minute It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus (2019) takes viewers into the liminal space of a Berlin immigration center. People of various backgrounds wait for their assigned numbers to be called, stuck at a place akin to a post office or clinic. The title references a song from the early 20th century, metaphorically describing humanity’s evolutionary journey. Though the scientific theory behind the song’s lyrics has since been abandoned, Aljafari’s choice of title suggests a humanistic topic–contemporary man has naturalized his own inventions, at the core mere social constructs. The film is highly atmospheric and much more a film of space than of any specific social issue.
Stylistically consistent with his earlier works, It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus is even more striking aesthetically, a film of low-key, cold cinematography. It represents Aljafari’s foray into surrealist image-making: the red numbers anxiously awaited by the immigrants drift off the screens, float through the waiting room, gather on walls, and eventually spill into the streets like a swarm. Aljafari himself appears in brief, distant interactions with immigrants, captured amid the surrounding chaos. His focus lingers on Arabic signs in the center’s children’s corner, asking parents to return toys after use—a quiet yet powerful acknowledgment of Palestinian presence.
The 80-minute An Unusual Summer (2020) is built from minimally edited footage captured by a surveillance camera in a Ramle neighborhood. Aljafari’s father had installed the camera in the 2000s after his car was vandalized. The footage reconstructs the lives of local residents while maintaining suspense over whether further damage to the car will occur. By curating and rearranging the most eventful clips, Aljafari weaves a loose narrative and even manipulates the imagery to create surreal effects. In one sequence, various passersby present at different times appear simultaneously in the same frame, forming a crowd that never physically gathered. This suggests that a specific location can connect disparate lives and provide a space for communal existence. The film offers a window into Ramle, a city that, since 1995, has served as an oasis of Palestinian self-governance amid the fragmented and besieged West Bank.
Aljafari once again combines clips from existing films when editing the short film Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022), repurposing material that vividly depicts Israeli military preparations, so heroic and dramatic that it is hard to believe the footage is entirely documentary in nature. The war maneuvers and demonstrations of weaponry simply seem too contrived, suggesting they are originally fictional representations of war, if not outright propaganda material. The title, as in an earlier work, is borrowed from a literary source, a text by Jorge Luis Borges from his collection Dreamtigers (El hacedor, 1960), which states: “Humanity has lost a face, an irrevocable face, and everyone longs to be that pilgrim (…) who goes to Rome and looks upon the veil of St. Veronica” and believes in the true imprint of Jesus Christ’s face. In other words, “if we truly knew what that face looked like, we would possess the keys to parables and would know with certainty that the carpenter’s son was also the Son of God” (my translation, ed.).
From these images, Aljafari extracts a general idea about representation as something we naturally distrust, yet we desire the existence of an authority beyond us that will point us to one true, definitive, ultimate representation–one that, if indeed such, ceases to be a representation and reveals itself as the thing represented, the original itself. Logically, this is impossible in the world we know, which is why we reach for the world promised by religion–in this case, Christianity. Similarly, we perceive war as a representation because it reaches us through media, mediated by images whose credibility we must question, but whose interpretation and creation the most powerful forces always monopolize. What is the image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when it is created by Israelis, the subject to whom Godard noted the privilege of fictional images versus the necessary evil of documentary images imposed on Palestinians? Paradiso, XXXI, 108 carries a dose of absurdity, evoking the aesthetic of Michael Mann during the peak of his success with films such as Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986)–vibrant, bright, almost fluorescent, and accompanied by music that turns the imagery into something resembling videos once aired on MTV. Considering the subject of the footage Aljafari works with, the result is a fascinating paradox.
The short film UNDR (2024) is a cinematic essay based on material of varying ages. Aljafari primarily uses wide shots and aerial footage of a geopolitically contentious landscape under systematic surveillance and Israeli invasion. The soundtrack consists of experimental music that also serves as a dramatizing factor. In some scenes, Palestinian residents cultivate the land, herd camels and other animals to pasture, carry loads, and collectively wash clothes at water sources. The film captures characteristic architecture and other territorial changes, which Palestinians have shaped over centuries but whose presence is gradually becoming invisible or has already been erased. There are also numerous shots of explosions that do not appear to document actual wartime conflicts but do allude to the area’s entanglement with war–if not directly on the depicted sites, then certainly always nearby. One could say that repetition is the film’s primary building block, which consequently leaves the impression of a constantly reactivated trauma within the filmed environment.
Finally, Aljafari’s most subversive project to date, A Fidai Film (2024), is the result of a brilliant archival effort. The utilized material has a very intriguing history. During the 1982 invasion of Beirut, which targeted the forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Israelis confiscated and partially destroyed the Palestinian Research Center. These archives held numerous Palestinian films, both fictional and documentary, which bore witness to the work of Palestinian liberation factions as well as civilian life, especially in the imposed camps. Israeli institutions unilaterally made this material available online during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when Aljafari also collected material for Paradiso, XXXI, 108 and UNDR. A Fidai Film is unique for its act of guerrilla restitution of documentation that originally belonged to Palestinians, followed by interventions in it similar to those previously executed by the Israelis themselves. Specifically, the stolen material had been altered, with Israeli annotations and markings added to the film reels, and portions of it cut.
Aljafari similarly crosses texts and images of his choosing, rewriting history against colonizers and usurpers, giving the final product a distinctive visual identity based on the use of blood-red ink. Tragedies are suggested through stylized depictions of bloody traces, and occasionally new human figures appear as tributes to those whose actual presence has been erased in real life as well as on film. Scenes of harmonious Palestinian life, faces and landscapes illuminated in color, also appear, alongside television reports from Western media showing mass arrests, Israeli soldiers on the streets, shattered windows riddled with bullets. Document checks among the population, widespread barbed wire fences, and the most controversial sight–the Israelis’ combing through the archives–are recorded. This film earned Aljafari the most notable awards of his career, including honors at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, the DokuFest in Prizren, the Pesaro Film Festival, and the FID in Marseille.
Although the regional audiences in Ljubljana and Sarajevo had the chance to see A Fidai Film long before the one in Zagreb, the HRFF’s Aljafari retrospective positioned the festival alongside top-tier film programs in 2024, such as IndieLisboa and the New York Anthology Film Archives. Such recognition is evidence of initiatives that successfully cultivate a highly refined taste among domestic audiences. Particularly in terms of documentary production, it also signifies an investment in thoughtful engagement with contemporary social issues. Aljafari’s retrospective is a bright, if not brilliant, highlight of the 22nd edition of the Human Rights Film Festival in Zagreb. Apart from introducing a stylistically sophisticated oeuvre of yet another global auteur, it also explored the unique concept of the cinema of the dispossessed, applicable well beyond the urgent Palestinian question.