Kamal Aljafari
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“Personal Storytelling, Experimentation, and a DIY Spirit”: A Look Inside LAFM 2026
Returning for its third annual edition, the Los Angeles Festival of Movies boasts a lineup of critical darlings from other festivals, newly-restored global cinema, and even the odd world premiere. Co-founded by Sarah Winshall, producer behind indie gems like I Saw the TV Glow and Good One, and Micah Gottlieb, artistic director of the programming non-profit Mezzanine, LAFM was created in part to respond to a dearth of indie film exhibition in the metropolis. From April 9 through 12, L.A.’s east side will serve as a watering hole for filmgoers in a city that, while integral to the filmmaking ecosystem at large, has been […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 9, 2026 -
Locarno 2025: A Cinema of Risks
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed […]
by Leonardo Goi on Aug 21, 2025 -
“The Process of Dehumanization that Happened to the Palestinians”: Kamal Aljafari on A Fidai Film
It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari. One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to a wholly new level of fame – and deservedly so. Often traveling alongside his latest short film, UNDR (which premiered at IFFR), A Fidai Film has been screened in almost three dozen festivals, while Aljafari has been the subject of two major retrospectives at Anthology […]
by Flavia Dima on Dec 17, 2024 -
Kamal Aljafari’s Port of Memory
There are two barely related images that repeatedly come back to me as I begin to write about Port of Memory (2010) by Kamal Aljafari. One is a house cat languishing on top of a television set, in a family’s living room. The TV is playing a dramatization of the life of Jesus. At first the cat appears inert; the viewer is unsure whether it is an odd piece of bric-a-brac or a living but particularly lethargic mammal. The camera lingers long enough to confirm the latter. The second is a short stretch of Jaffa streets. An Israeli man singing […]
by Webadmin on Feb 18, 2011
