The image grows larger and before us a face emerges that was hidden. We see it now, pixeled. But pixels don’t matter as they are not an aesthetic or technical matter, but a political matter. Recollection, Kamal Aljafari’s latest film, is a found footage work creating a visual tour of Jaffa. The protagonists are edited out of the original footage, so that the focus moves beyond actors and invented narratives and onto the people and spaces in the background. The roles are inverted: hegemonic and subordinates, oppressors and oppressed, masters and servants.

Using material from Israeli fiction films shot in Jaffa between the ‘60s and the ‘90s – amongst them those starring Chuck Norris – the director executes a new montage that, as Walter Benjamin proposed, “interrupts” history and retrieves what has been ignored; he brings those images back to the present time, into the light, and launches them into the future.

Germany, Jaffa | 2015 | 70 mins

Following the screening director Kamal Aljafari will be in conversation Adrian Rifkin.

Kamal Aljafari‘s filmography includes ‘Recollection’ (2015), ‘Port of Memory’ (2009) and ‘The Roof’ (2006). He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York, and in 2009/2010 was the Benjamin White Whitney Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center. In 2010, he taught film at The New School in New York City, and from 2011 to 2013 he was a senior lecturer and head of the directing program for the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin. He received a number of film prizes and art grants, among them Louis Marcorelles award, Kunstfonds fellowship, as well as the Friedrich Vordemberge visual art prize of the city of Cologne in Germany. In 2016 he was a jury member in the Torino Film Festival and a showcase of his work took place at Lussas Film Festival in France and at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal.

Adrian Rifkin is a visiting professor in art, 4 D, at Central Saint Martins and was previously a Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths. He does lecture/perfomances on subjects such as the lost object, adequate knowledges and contemporary issues in art and politics, and writes on and works with artists and art writers.