For more than twenty years, the cinema of Kamal Aljafari has returned to the same streets, buildings, and communities. The Palestinian director born in Ramla to a family with firsthand experience of displacement has built an oeuvre rooted in places that official histories often overlook and military regimes seek to erase.
And you know perfectly well that we don't ever leave home - we simply drag it behind us wherever we go, walls, roof and all. — Anton Shammas, quoted from The Roof
Ultimately, I’m speaking about a country that we have lost, a homeland that we have lost and I’m not trying to escape from that loss. Every film I’ve made—and every film I will make—starts from that condition, from trying to find a way to relate to it. — Kamal Aljafari for Untold Mag
Aljafari's films don’t begin with grand narratives, but with neighbours, family members, balconies, streets, houses — spaces where history persists in everyday life. Early works such as Visit Iraq, The Roof, Port of Memory, Balconies, and An Unusual Summer are shaped by a close attention to the communities around him. Filming from within these environments, Aljafari transforms ordinary encounters into records of collective experience. The neighbourhood is never merely a backdrop, it becomes a protagonist in its own right, carrying traces of displacement, survival, and continuity.
Over time, this attention expanded to the image itself. Discovering fragments of Palestinian life embedded in Israeli films, military footage, and institutional archives, Aljafari began reclaiming and transforming these materials. Works such as Recollection, UNDR, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, and A Fidai Film intervene in images produced by others, redirecting them toward the people and places they once rendered invisible. As Aljafari describes it, altering such images is both an artistic and political act: a way of "sabotaging" them and making them speak differently.
Bringing together ten films spanning more than two decades, this retrospective follows a practice that moves between observation and intervention, street corner and archive. What connects these works is a commitment to preserving visibility: for communities, for places, and for histories that continue to exist despite repeated attempts to remove them from view.
Kamal Aljafari: Walls, Roof and All is streaming worldwide except for Israel.
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