Reel B75-92 shows scenes of orange-picking in Qalandia in 1957, which, according to the Hebrew description, are images of “terrorists”… They come from a collection of films and photos that were kept at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut, until it was looted by the Israeli Army during the invasion of Southern Lebanon in 1982, and transferred to the archives of the Hebrew state’s army and Ministry of Defense. It was only in the 2010s that academic circles – in Tel Aviv, in particular – began to question the aims of this systematic plundering of the entire Palestinian visual memory, which became war booty in part renamed for ideological reasons: the occupying power de facto ensuring control of the captured material. In A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari(An Unusual Summer, VdR 2020) turns this primordial plundering against those who perpetrated it.
By revitalizing these lost images through his vibrant editing process, he unleashes the subversive power of a counter-narrative that has been erased over the decades, portraying life in Palestine before and after 1948 – particularly during the British mandate of the 1920s-1930s, when the tangible signs of future spoliation, humiliation and violence were already apparent. The Palestinian filmmaker thus meditates with a unique space-time depth of field on the fate of images produced by a people doubly dispossessed, both of its land, and of its history.
Stay tuned for upcoming screenings!
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian director and artist based in Germany. Lauded for his inventive approach to filmmaking, Aljafari has garnered international acclaim for his films which have been featured at venues and festivals including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Berlinale, and the Viennale. In 2021, he received special recognition at Brazil’s Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival, where the Focus Section was dedicated to his oeuvre.
