2025-2026
Palestine
Kamal Aljafari (Palestine) is a filmmaker born in Ramla in 1972. His films are largely affiliated with the world of documentary, although employing a variety of different procedures and formats in dialogue with the visual arts as well as the essay film and experimental cinema. One of the hallmarks of this process lies in the manipulation of images in an attempt to extrapolate their figurative nature, as in his treatment of domestic surveillance footage. He received an MFA from Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2003). His short and feature-length films have screened at festivals and venues worldwide, including Berlinale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Prismatic Ground, EXiS, Viennale, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, winning major awards from FIDMarseille, Pesaro Film Festival and Visions du Réel, among others. A full retrospective of his work to date was held at IndieLisboa in 2024. Aljafari has taught at The New School in New York and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin in Berlin. He has received fellowships from the Film Study Center-Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and currently a Fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University (2024-2025). His latest film, With Hasan in Gaza, will premiere at Locarno Film Festival in August 2025. He lives and works between Berlin and Paris.
“To what extent can the real and figural materiality of an image become an abstraction or, potentially more, a spectrum? The question evokes both aesthetic and ethical problems which, in Kamal Aljafari’s cinema, converge towards a territory as real as it is abstract and phantasmagorical: Palestine. While Aljafari’s cinema stems from the observation of an everyday life that not only coexists within, but inhabits ruin itself, he subsequently transforms these images into trails, echoes, smudges, blurs and, in his most radical recent films, pixels uncapturable by notions of the real. The art of transforming the harrowing materiality of broken walls and destroyed terraces of an invaded territory into a disembodied immateriality is the art of reconfiguring Palestine as a nation, which through moving images ultimately surpasses the forces that imprison and destroy that space. An act of defiance. In Aljafari’s cinema, Palestine becomes a shadow that runs faster than the body from which it emanates”. — Olhar de Cinema
DISCUSSION of A FIDAI FILM WITH KAMAL ALJAFARI