Port of Memory

Born in Ramla, Palestine, in 1972, Kamal Aljafari tirelessly collects and preserves images. The memory of his family and that of the Palestinian people serve as the foundation of his filmography, a creative corpus that exemplifies like no other the struggle to safeguard an identity under constant siege and threat. For Aljafari, the personal and the collective are inseparable. His quest entails finding absences in order to ensure their existence and survival. The materiality of cinema is therefore an obsession for this artist, who, film after film also challenges conventional ways of representing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by spanning an immense range of forms that flow seamlessly from documentary to essay, and always from innovative aesthetic perspectives. His films demonstrate that another narrative is indeed possible and that, more than anything else, cinema continues to be a powerful tool for liberation.