Kamal Aljafari: AN UNUSUAL SUMMER (2020)
@ Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
40 Arts Circle Dr, Evanston, IL 60208
Opening Wednesday, February 28th, at 7PM
AN UNUSUAL SUMMER
(Kamal Aljafari, 2020, English and Arabic with English subtitles, 80 min, digital)
The opening titles of the archival documentary AN UNUSUAL SUMMER (2020) portend a real-life, low-res, found-footage whodunit: “Someone broke the window of my father’s car three times. To find out who was breaking the window, my father installed a surveillance camera.” With this premise, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari intrigues viewers to pore over his father’s grainy surveillance tapes, which capture life ca. 2006 in the Arab neighborhood of Ramle, a mixed Palestinian-Jewish city in what today is the Central District of Israel.
Through deft editing, evocative sound design, and poetic use of text, Aljafari gradually exposes not the culprit, but rather the unique and multifaceted texture of Palestinian community. Filmmaker and writer Nada El-Omari describes how Aljafari’s film exemplifies a practice of looking carefully: “In grace, in accident, in parcels, in smile, in memory and in the absurdity of the everyday, AN UNUSUAL SUMMER demands that you take a moment to look at the people, to look at the bodies, to look at the humans, souls and experiences that take place every moment of a day, every second of a life.”
AN UNUSUAL SUMMER is presented as an “open classroom” screening for “Art of the Real: A History of Documentary,” taught by Michael Metzger, Block Museum Curator of Cinema and Media Arts.
With gratitude to Laiba Paracha (doctoral student, Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures) and Domietta Torlasco (Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature).
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Tags: Block Museum, Domietta Torlasco, Evanston, Kamal Aljafari, Kamal Aljafari: AN UNUSUAL SUMMER (2020), Laiba Paracha, Michael Metzger, Nada El-Omari, Northwestern
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