KAMAL ALJAFARI | History without images, images without history

POOR IMAGES

Kamal Aljafari (born 1972) is a Palestinian filmmaker. He has taught at The New School in New York and at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. His achievements have been recognised with fellowships at the “Film Study Centre – Radcliffe Institute” at Harvard University and, most recently, at the “Institute for Ideas and Imagination” at Columbia University. He has directed a total of twelve short and feature films. A FIDAI FILM won the Grand Jury Prize at Visions du Réel in 2024. WITH HASAN IN GAZA received the Europa Cinemas Label Award at the Locarno Film Festival in 2025.

Making visible what seems to be missing from dominant narratives or is difficult to detect in them is a constant feature of Kamal Aljafari’s work. With his two most recent feature films, we are giving space to the subversive act of making the invisible visible. His works push the conceptual and formal boundaries set by conventional film aesthetics – they explore new territory in a political cinema, demanding, in the face of reality, a form of “cinematic justice” that goes far beyond objective historicism and didactic documentaries on social issues. In doing so, an artistic subjectivity preponderates here, whilst the idea of cinema as an instrument of colonisation and oppression is deconstructed. At the same time, we see how Aljafari explores the potential for reappropriation of found footage and dives head first into a wide variety of archival materials, always accompanied by a precise, rigorous sound design. His cinematic practice functions as an act of resistance. To enable a deeper immersion into the visual and conceptual worlds of the films, his long-standing collaborator and producer, Flavia Mazzarino, will be present.