Volume 20, Issue 10 / October 2016

Kamal Aljafari Retrospective

For this issue Offscreen mirrors its French sister magazine Hors Champ, who have organized a joint retrospective with Montreal’s cinémathèque québécoise on the filmmaker Kamal Aljafari. Aljafari will be present at the screenings to introduce and discuss his work. Author Nour Ouayda contributes an important introduction to the retrospective on the cinémathèque québécoise website, which also carries the English version (if you scroll down) sponsored by the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Offscreen is featuring a sample of articles that are in the current November-December issue of Hors Champ. Four to be precise. Although all of the four articles appear in French on Hors Champ, one appears here in its original English, Farah Atoui’s “Appropriate, Re-mix, Erase, Zoom-in: The Transformative Power of Film-Making in Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection”. The other three appear here in English translation: Nour Ouayda’s “Cinema as Country” and “Letter for an Aborted Interview” and Viviane Saglier’s “The Circulation of Palestinian Images.” Also part of the event a discussion between filmmaker Kamal Aljafari and Prof. Peter Limbrick, Film & Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz, entitled “Displaced Memory and the Politics of Space”, took place on Nov. 28 at 4pm in Morrice Hall, TNC Theatre, Room 017, McGill University. The films being screened in the retrospective are: Balconies (2007), The Roof (2006), Visit Iraq (2003), Port of Memory (2009), and Recollection (2015). If Aljafari’s films can be considered marginal, then it is somewhat fitting that the final unrelated piece in this issue be about just that: “Brazil’s Marginal Cinema.” Author Frédéric St-Hilaire analyzes a group of films that proudly bear the label of “aesthetics of garbage.” (Donato Totaro, ed.)

The cinémathèque québécoise website:

Hors Champ: Rétrospective Kamal Aljafar”:http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/spip.php?rubrique1:

All the images in this issue that are from Kamal Aljafari’s films have been, indirectly through the authors or Hors Champ’s editorial team, approved or provided by the director.

[The follow-up to last month’s Independent Cinema issue that was slated for this October issue will appear next month]