PALESTINE: INTERIOR/EXTERIOR 2 films, 2 filmmakers in person

PALESTINE: INTERIOR / EXTERIOR
Videos by James T. Hong and Kamal Aljafari, both in person

Local San Francisco artist James T. Hong presents THIS SHALL BE A SIGN (2007) and visiting Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari presents The Roof (2006). These works take up the contemporary moment in Palestine/Israel in radically different ways.

Hong’s half-hour This Shall be a Sign is an experimental collage that combines observa-tional footage and media reports of the recent conflict over the reconstruction of an entrance ramp to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. It is “an interpretation of the conflict over the reconstruction of a ramp …, of the struggle for sovereignty over a holy site, and of the power of technology as the ubiquitous medium of communication and information in the age of multinational capitalism and the dominion of the English language.” (JH)

Kamal Aljafari’s hour-long The Roof, is a visually eloquent and politically understated cinematic essay exploring physical and psychic senses of place in the context of Aljafari’s family history in Ramleh and Jaffa. Aljafari conveys how the region’s space, time, history — as well as the forms of individual and collective experience they generate — have been molded by politics and Israeli institutionalized neglect. The roof of Aljafari’s title is an absent one, on the unfinished house where his family has lived since their resettlement in 1948, and it functions as a place of waiting, literal and figurative, marked by constant deferral.