RECOLLECTION Film Screening followed by Q&A with Director Kamal Aljafari

Moderated by Hamid Dabashi

Monday February 22, 2016

7:00PM

Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari will screen his film Recollection and offer a master class the following evening.

Hamid Dabashi, renowned film expert and Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, will moderate the two evenings.

Recollection utilizes footage from Israeli films as raw material for exploring, reconstructing, and sharing this inaccessible history:

“For many years, I have been collecting Israeli fiction films shot in Jaffa as early as 1960. These are films in which Palestinians are disappeared, yet also exist at the edge of frames, visible in traces. Preserved also is a city; alive again in moving images, its gradual destruction over the decades chronicled film by film. From the footage of dozens of films I have excavated a whole community and recreated the city. Though out-of-focus, half-glimpsed, I have recognized childhood friends, old people I used to say good evening to as a boy; my uncle. I erased the actors, I photographed the backgrounds and the edges; and made the passersby the main characters of this film. In my film, I find my way from the sea, like in a dream. I walk everywhere, sometimes hesitant and sometimes lost. I wander through the city; I wander through the memories. I film everything I encounter because I know it no longer exists. I return to a lost time.” – Kamal Aljafari

This event is part of the Center for Palestine Studies art initiative, Palestine Cuts.

Free and open to the public.

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