The director who won’t take money from Israel but wants Israelis to see his films
Yasmin Zaher - Feb 27, 2019 4:25 PM
Kamal Aljafari was born in Ramle but works from Berlin. In a conversation with Haaretz, he explains how his work is about the place he left: ‘I use cinema as an act of reclamation’
▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-the-director-who-won-t-take-money-from-israel-but-wants-israelis-t
When filmmaker Kamal Aljafari talks about Palestinian cinema and where it is going, he begins with an important clarification. “It’s becoming clear that Palestinian art and cinema is now coming from all over the world. We’re not talking about historic Palestine anymore.”
Why the Palestinian art scene is increasingly being seen as an international movement has obvious political reasons related to the absence of a Palestinian state and the unresolved status of refugees. The majority of Palestinians today – over 6 million – live in the diaspora. But the case of Aljafari, who has Israeli-German citizenship, is different: It touches on the universal relationship between art and exile, and attests to an inability to create from within.
Aljafari, 47, was born in Ramle, in “what Israelis call the Arab ghetto,” he tells Haaretz by phone. In 1998, after completing his studies at Hebrew University, he went to study film in Germany and has stayed there ever since. He lives and works in Berlin, but continues to visit Israeli regularly – because “my work is about the place that I left.”
He says he simply couldn’t accept the conditions of his existence in Israel anymore. “I was fed up with being a second-class citizen. We come from there, but it is not our country anymore,” he says.
Reality as sci-fi
Two weeks ago, Aljafari premiered his new film, “It’s a Long Way From Amphioxus,” at the Berlin International Film Festival. Continuing his objective of “taking people from the margins” and making them the main focus, his 17-minute short was filmed in a West Berlin center for processing asylum seekers – one of the largest of its kind.
The film presents dark, crowded scenes from the waiting room, with only the bright red numbers of the queue-management system shining brightly. In the film’s only moment of dialogue, a Syrian woman turns to a young man and asks him “What are they distributing here?” “Numbers,” he responds.
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What we imagine for ourselves
In his bio on the Berlinale website, the filmmaker is described as “Kamal Aljafari, born in Palestine in 1972.” In Germany, he says, he can be a Palestinian and not have to submit to a system that compromises his identity.
“I couldn’t accept a situation where I was being renamed, to have to use another name that someone gave me,” he says. “It’s not about facts, it’s about what we imagine for ourselves – and I try to do the same in my films.”
He reiterates that he is not talking about a national identity. “I’m talking about what it means to be a person from the margins – geographic margins, gender margins, whatever they are. It’s more natural for me to be an immigrant here [in Germany], where there are other immigrants. But I couldn’t accept being an immigrant in my own country. I needed to free myself. Saying ‘Born in Palestine in 1972’ is abstract, it’s poetic.”
His films may be experimental but Aljafari is an extremely down-to-earth artist, able to soberly diagnose the challenges facing Palestinian filmmakers. “We are a fragmented, diasporic nation,” he reflects. “The problem of cinema is that it relies heavily on money. If you look at national cinema – in Europe, Asia or in Israel itself – there’s a state behind it. We are stateless, and this makes it a lot more difficult to gather the means to make films. History is written by the powerful, and as an oppressed people it’s harder for us to tell our stories.”
The financing dilemma is especially pertinent for Palestinians in Israel. As Aljafari explains, “The Israeli state pours a lot of money into cinema, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to make critical films. They intervene in the content. We see this with the ‘loyalty law,’” he says, referring to the legislation that allows Israel’s Culture Ministry to withhold funding on political grounds.
“Imagine a film fund asking German or French artists to declare loyalty to the German or French state,” Kamal continues, “It’s crazy. It’s against art.”
There is also another obstacle, with this one coming from a surprising source. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement makes no concessions for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and in theory applies the same regulations to them as it does to their Jewish-Israeli counterparts. It appears that disenfranchisement, in some cases, can be just as bad, if not worse, than statelessness.
Aljafari, though, has a typically original take on the problem. “I want my films to be shown to Israeli audiences, but I’m just not interested in cooperating with Israeli government institutions,” he says. “The system didn’t grant me a place to live and create, so I chose to work outside it. I made the decision to never take money from the Israeli state a long time before BDS existed. It’s related to a personal decision to restore who I am.”