In Port of Memory, Kamal Aljafari overturns the conventional cinematic account of Palestinian subjects, predominantly by meditating on the state of Palestinians within Israel. Specifically, Aljafari focuses on the Palestinian residents in Jaffa, a population of about 3,000 people amidst nearly half a million Jewish Israelis. Like other Palestinian cities, Jaffa came under Israeli occupation after the 1948 Nakba and the mass majority of the population, including my paternal grandparents, were ethnically cleansed. Jaffa has now become an extension of Tel Aviv, and frequently serves as the backdrop for action films set in the Middle East, without showing any actual Palestinians. Through portraying Jaffa not as a place in ruin or an ‘underdeveloped’ city in the process of ‘redevelopment’, but as a place of habituation, a place of resilience and resistance against gentrification and occupation, Aljafari not only resists conventional narratives about Palestinian subjects, but Palestinian cities themselves. In his restitution of the city and its relationship to the Palestinian population, Aljafari engages in a radical act of historic preservation. Traveling from the subjective to the objective, the film captures the essence of being Palestinian under occupation.

Port of Memory focuses on the lives of a Palestinian family, Aljafari’s extended family, who are living with the imminent threat of eviction from their home that they purchased 40 years prior. This is their second time needing to prove their case. The old part of the city remains in a state of legal limbo over ownership claims and much of the houses sit boarded up and empty; ambient sounds of construction and demolition of buildings pervade the film’s score. And yet, the focus is on the materiality of the city, as well as the sounds, gestures and minutiae of everyday life. A cat lazily napping on the TV, an elderly parent cared for, Aljafari’s aunt ritually and systematically washing her hands in the sink: Aljafari returns the city and the sea to its Palestinian inhabitants and allows them the space to enliven the city through everyday life — while rendering the experience of the details of settler colonial experiences.

The characters’ gestures clearly carry the weight of crisis, while also holding close to one another and the city. The frenetic activity of settler-colonial violence is met with the still obstinance of the town’s residents, who remain. There is a sense of suspension, a sense of waiting, a sense of, as Aljafari puts it in an interview, “being in a limbo and living in an uncertainty, which is the situation of almost any Palestinian.” The inhabitants are bored, they are tired, they are just getting by,yet they are still there, still living. The home is a site of conflict, and inhabitance is a form of resistance. Port of Memory captures the essence of being Palestinian in Israel, while blurring the lines between fiction and documentary, while engaging questions of history, memory, and fact.