Port Of Memory
Dir. Kamal Aljafari, Palestine/Germany/France, 2009, 62 min.
SUNDAY MARCH 30 — 8:30 PM
In person: Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto
Online: TQFF.ca
 
CLICK HERE to purchase your TQFF 2025 festival pass.
Tickets are Pay-What-You-Can.
Programmed by Tara Hakim
 
The short film I would like to visit, Dir. Muhammad Nour ElKhair, will be followed by the feature presentation of Port of Memory.
 
Port of Memory focuses on the lives of a Palestinian family, Aljafari’s extended family, who are living with the imminent threat of eviction from their home that they purchased 40 years prior. This is their second time needing to prove their case. The old part of the city remains in a state of legal limbo over ownership claims, and much of the houses sit boarded up and empty; ambient sounds of construction and demolition of buildings pervade the film's score. And yet, the focus is on the materiality of the city, as well as the sounds, gestures and minutiae of everyday life. A cat lazily napping on the TV, an elderly parent cared for, Aljafari’s aunt ritually and systematically washing her hands in the sink: Aljafari returns the city and the sea to its Palestinian inhabitants and allows them the space to
enliven the city through everyday life — while rendering the experience of the details of settler colonial experiences.
 
The characters’ gestures clearly carry the weight of crisis, while also holding close to one another and the city. The frenetic activity of settler-colonial violence is met with the still obstinance of the town’s residents, who remain. There is a sense of suspension, a sense of waiting, a sense of, as Aljafari puts it in an interview, “being in a limbo and living in an uncertainty, which is the situation of almost any Palestinian.” The inhabitants are bored, they are tired, they are just getting by, yet they are still there, still living. The home is a site of conflict, and inhabitance is a form of resistance. Port of Memory captures the essence of being Palestinian in Israel, while blurring the lines between fiction and documentary, while engaging questions of history, memory, and fact.
 
Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari studied at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and currently lives in Berlin. He has taught filmmaking at The New School (New York) and the DFFB (Berlin). He is a fellow at the  Institute for Ideas and Imagination of Columbia University. In May 2024, IndieLisboa dedicated a retrospective to his work. In 2024 his film UNDR was selected at IFFR and A Fidai Film at Visions du Réel, where it won the Grand Jury Prize Burning Lights Competition. Aljafari is currently working on a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.
 
Presented in collaboration with Cinema Politica, World Beyond War Toronto, Reassemblage Collective, Independent Jewish Voices Toronto - York Region, and Toronto Palestine Film Festival