Screen/Society--Modern Cinemas of the Middle East--"Port of Memory" - w/ Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari in person!

Thursday, February 3, 2011 - 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Screen/Society--Modern Cinemas of the Middle East--"Port of Memory" - w/ Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari in person!

Port of Memory
(Kamal Aljafari, 2009, 63 min, Israel/Palestine, Arabic w/ English Subtitles, Color, DVD)

Port of Memory follows director Kamal Aljafari's his own family's story after they receive an official order to evacuate their home in Ajami, a seafront neighborhood of once-wealthy homes and villas in Jaffa. The family is thrown into disarray, and, lacking the means to fight back, a mute despair cloaks their lives. Radically poetic, blending mundane gestures of everyday life with evocations of collective memory, Port of Memory travels freely between the subjective and the objective.

-- Q&A to follow with director Kamal Aljafari!

About the filmmaker: Kamal Aljafari is an internationally recognized filmmaker whose work searches for home while also questioning the boundaries between “documentary” and “fiction.” His portfolio includes Port of Memory (2009),
The Roof (2006), Visit Iraq (2003) and My Father’s Video (2009).  Blending a potent mix of personal ethics, transnational politics, and video and film aesthetics, Aljafari reinvents the long take, the slow tracking shot through space, and widescreen mise-en scene - once keynotes of European art cinema - in films where time and place take precedence over story and character. Aljafari’s films represent a new kind of domestic ethnography - “home movies” in which his family members come to represent all who wait, survivors of a decimated nation, forever looking for what has vanished, confined to an ever eroding domestic orbit, in a war with no end in sight.

Aljafari studied theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a master’s degree in film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Before joining the New School, he had been a Film Study Center Fellow and Benjamin White Whitney Scholar at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute (2009-2010) where he worked on an interdisciplinary media project titled “A Cinematic Occupation”. 

His awards include Best International Video at The Images Festival in Toronto, Soundtrack award Fidmarseille film festival, Marseille France, and the Friedrich-Vordemberge
Visual Art Prize of the City of Cologne. He has received grants from the Sundance Documentary Fund, Filmstiftung, Kunstfonds, Kunststiftung in Germany and Fonds Sud Cinema in France.

Most recently his new work, Port of Memory, was awarded The Louis Marcorelles Award by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Related events with Kamal Aljafari at UNC-CH:

Friday, February 4 at 5:30pm:
Filmmaker Kamal Aljafari will screen his independent films The Roof (2006, 61 min) and Visit Iraq (2003, 26 min) in the Mandela Auditorium of the Global Education Center at UNC.
-- Q&A with the director will follow the screening.
Refreshments will be served.

Friday, February 4 at 10am:
In addition, Aljafari will teach a master class on his films on Friday morning from 10:00am-1:00 pm in 205 House Undergraduate Library at UNC. No prior experience with film necessary.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: At Duke: Center for Jewish Studies, Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI). At UNC: Dept. of Asian Studies, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, Center for Global Initiatives, Interdisciplinary Program in Cinema/ScreenArts.

White 107 (White Lecture Hall)