Summer Film Series: “Recollection” by Kamal Aljafari

Wednesday | June 15 | 6:00 p.m.
* A very light snack will be served at 5:30 p.m. Please note that RSVP is requested, which you can do below or by calling in at (202) 338-1958.

 

** This series is co-sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.
 

 

Kamal Aljafari’s latest film is composed entirely of footage from Israeli and American fiction features shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s, primarily of the bourekas genre that dramatized tense romantic relationships between Mizrahi male “thugs” and Ashkenazi female elites. Jaffa provided the perfect setting to construct new Israeli narratives on top of emptied Palestinian ruins. As Aljafari explains, Palestinians were effectively “uprooted in reality and in fiction.” In Recollection, Aljafari removes the Israeli actors to give the stage to the people who appear by chance in the background of these shots, including both Palestinians and Iraqi Jews who were settled in the city, enacting what he describes as “cinematic justice.”  By Kamal Aljafari / Germany, Jaffa / 2015 / 70 mins
 
To read more about the film, click here
To find out about the other films in the Summer Film Series, please click here