Kamal Aljafari

Amidst fragments of memories and images of a people beset with the insignia of erasure, Kamal Aljafari’s cinema presents chapters of an unfinished story, all at once personal and communal. The Palestinian director and artist, born in the city of Ramla, in 1972, and based in Germany for years, has created a poetic filmography, devising an elaborate mise-en-scene with different modes of resistance against the systematic attempts to destroy subjects, places, and the symbolic field that attest to a Palestinian existence. Over the course of his almost two-decade career, the filmmaker has undertaken a thorough investigation into the forms and politics of images amidst their power games, about what is seen and what has been made invisible, among material and memorial ruins interpolated in the editing room. His oeuvre is largely affiliated with the world of documentary, although it rallies a variety of different procedures and formats in dialogue with the visual arts as much as the essay and experimental universe. One of the hallmarks of this process lies in the manipulation of images in an attempt to extrapolate their figurative nature – such as the use of domestic surveillance footage from a street camera in his latest feature film, An Unusual Summer (2020). His film A Fidai Film (2024) premiered in the Burning Lights competition of Visions du Réel, where it won the Jury Award. More recently, his film With Hasan in Gaza (2025) premiered in the international competition of the 78th Locarno Film Festival.