18th Arab Film Festival

Saturday, September 28 at 2:30pm

The screening of A Fidai Film (78 min) is preceded by Undr (15 min).

ABOUT A Fidai Film

Dir. Kamal Aljafari • Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brazil, France • 2024 • 78 min • Essay/Documentary • English, Arabic, Hebrew
In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. They raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents related to, from, and about Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Starting with the premise of the plundered image, A Fidai Film explores the visual memory of this looting and re-appropriates images now in the hands of Israeli archivists.

ABOUT Undr

Dir. Kamal Aljafari • Palestine, Germany • 2024 • 15 min • Experimental/Documentary • Arabic
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. The film reminds its viewers that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.

FILMMAKER BIO

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker. His cinema presents chapters of an unfinished story at once personal and communal. Over the course of his almost two-decade career, Aljafarihas undertaken a thorough investigation into the forms and politics of images amidst their power games, about what is seen and what has been made invisible, among material and memorial ruins interpolated in the editing room.

PRESENTED BY MIZNA

Celebrating 25 years in 2024, Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.