In UNDR (2024) by Kamal Aljafari (1971, Palestine), helicopter footage examines the land, its monuments, settlements, fields and deserts — circling the earth and its inhabitants: the herders guiding their cattle, children playing, or the tourists taking a dip in the Dead Sea. Employing archival footage, Aljafari constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion, serving as an unsettling reminder that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance.
The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places throughout, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests.
UNDR questions the underlying ideas behind the ownership of visual discourse and its legitimacy within the context of the occupation of Palestine, appropriating various forms of utilitarian footage in an act of resistance against the appropriation of the land and its image.
Country of production: Palestine and Germany
Year of production: 2024
Director: Kamal Aljafari
Editing: Yannig Willmann
Sound: Attila Faravelli
Assistant director: Flavia Mazzarino
Sound mixing: Jochen Jezussek
Screening dates:
Kamal Aljafari, ‘UNDR’, 2024; 14 minutes, 44 seconds
12 November – 9 December 2024
© Kamal Aljafari. Courtesy of the artist
About the artist:
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.
