↩

PARADISO, XXXI, 108

Kamal Aljafari
Palestine/Germany, 2022
18 min

“Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world’s biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs.”

Culled from Israeli military propaganda materials from the ‘60s and ‘70s, Paradiso, XXI, 108 regards (with irony) towards a “cinematic self-portrait of men playing war”, to quote its author. Kamal Aljafari works here with a network of intertextual quotations – Sebald, Borges, Alighieri, themselves also “found” by the author – to create a conceptual counterpoint to the (fictional – what we see are exercises) images on the screen: “was then Your image like the image I see now?” (Dante). Like in Unusual Summer (2020), the filmmaker uses extradiegetic sound as a means of fictionalization (Silent Night, Handel’s Sarabande), proving his position as one of the most important found footage filmmakers of the moment. (Flavia Dima)

Date and Location

29th of September, 18:30, Cinema Elvire Popesco

Tickets

Premii și festivaluri

Kamal Aljafari

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. He attended the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin. He has taught filmmaking at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. He was also a Film Study Center Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. In 2021 Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival in Brazil devoted its Focus Section to his work. Most recent work, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, premiered at Corti d’Autore, in Locarno Film Festival 2022. He is currently completing A Fidai Film, and preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

  • Technical sheet
  • PRODUCER: Kamal Aljafari
  • EDITING: Yannig Willmann
  • SOUND: Attila Faravelli
  • ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Flavia Mazzarino
  • PRODUCTION: Kamal Aljafari Productions

 

 

 

 

 

State (of) Terror

All films →

STAGING DEATH

Jan Soldat | Duration 8 min

Spoiler alert: Udo Kier dies a thousand deaths in Jan Soldat’s latest offering – a meditation on fictionality & cinematic conventions, and on the intrinsic links between life, death and film, spanning across all five decades of the German actor’s career.

PARADISO, XXXI, 108

Kamal Aljafari | Duration 18 min

“Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world’s biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs.”

NEIGHBOUR ABDI

Douwe Dijkstra | Duration 29 min

Abdi is a carpenter who settled in the Netherlands after spending his childhood in Mogadishu, in the midst of Somalia's civil war. Together with his neighbour Douwe, he reconstructs his life using a diorama, a green screen and his memories.

HANDBOOK

Pavel Mozhar | Duration 26 min.

Using personal testimonies, Pavel Mozhar creates a minute reenactment of the methods that were used to torture Belorussian dissidents arrested during the massive protests that took place in August 2020 against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko.

DIMA, DMITRY, DMYTRO. GLORY TO THE HEROES

Clemens Poole | Duration 24 min

Using a home video cassette that was shot during the nineties in Lugansk, a city now under Russian occupation, Clemens Poole creates a fictional protagonist onto which he projects an idealized narrative – but his character resists it and fights back.

Meniu →