The always-innovative Images Festival storms 25 venues across the GTA beginning Thursday with a 10-day blizzard of film screenings, groundbreaking live performances and eye-popping media art installations. We pressed festival Artistic Director Pablo de Ocampo for his curatorial pick of the crop, which turns out to be director Kamal Aljafari’s film Port of Memory; the film screens April 1 at 7 pm at the Bloor Cinema. Comment to win festival prize packs, details below.
While it’s always impossible to make a single “pick” from an entire festival, I think a good place to start is our opening night gala film, Kamal Aljafari’s Port of Memory. It’s never easy to decide on an opening night film but Aljafari’s work (director is pictured above), provides the perfect introduction for what will unfurl over the rest of the festival: merging documentary and fiction, Port of Memory is a film that, like the Images Festival itself, defies categories and easy definitions.
In Aljafari’s 2006 film The Roof (which won the best international video award at the 2007 Images Festival), there’s a key scene in which the artist and a friend are driving along the West Bank separation barrier. Though their conversation touches on the divisions between Palestinians and Israelis, the scene never devolves into that all-too-familiar image of a heated argument between people at a security checkpoint trying to get from point A to point B. They just drive. And as they drive, we see the wall passing through the windows of the vehicle; the biggest conflict arises when the car comes upon a truck parked too close to the barrier and a soldier helps guide them through the narrow opening.
This scene is indicative of what I find most striking about Aljafari’s films: although they’re created in the midst of a complex and heated political environment, his work is quietly restrained and his narratives — as potent as they may be — never hit the viewer over the head, rather the director favours an indirect mode of address. Aljafari’s stories show, rather than tell.
Both The Roof and Port of Memory focus on the story of Aljafari’s family and home in the cities of Jaffa and Ramle. As Palestinians living in Palestinian neighborhoods within Israel, the characters are in a constant state of limbo; their day-to-day lives are played out on camera — visiting a lawyer, looking for a new home, watching a nearby house be demolished, or simply walking the streets of their neighborhoods. The viewer is never quite sure if the scenes are actually happening or being re-enacted, which in the end, doesn’t really matter, anyway. True or false, Aljafari’s characters frame an analysis of the disorder and disarray that has resulted from the abandonment and decay of their neighborhoods.
WHERE/WHEN: Images Festival, April 1 – 10 at various venues, PWYC – $15, 416.971.8405.
Pablo de Ocampo, left, is a curator and occasional artist living in Toronto where he is the Artistic Director of the Images Festival. Prior to his post at Images, Pablo resided in Portland, Oregon where he helped to found the experimental film screening series Cinema Project and was the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center.
Livewithculture.ca has four Images Festival prize packs to give away to the first four people commenters on this post. The first two people to respond win a prize pack that includes: Images Membership with 2010 Festival Pass and Tote bag, t-shirt and Images publication – Richard Fung or Philip Hoffman book. The third and fourth people to respond will win an Images prize pack which includes vouchers to five select events at 2010 Festival including the opening night screening, tote bag, t-shirt and Images Publication. Winners will be notified by the Images Festival on how to pick up their prizes. So comment away . . .
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Really looking forward to Images this year, it looks like a really great line up!
And me, I’ll take a prize pack, thank you.
I’m Really looking forward to Images this year, it looks like a really stellar line up!