The short film I would like to visit will be followed by the feature presentation of Port of Memory.

Programmed by Tara Hakim

I would like to visit
Muhammad Nour ElKhairy • 4 min • Palestine/Canada • 2017

I Would Like to Visit is a deceptively simple experimental short that shows a close up of a computer screen onto which someone is typing and editing on a word-processing software. The film explores the simple desire of travelling, through the cultural and political realities of being a Palestinian in diaspora. As a Palestinian-Jordanian with roots in Jaffa, the diasporic experience of wanting to visit is intimately known. The process of text editing turns a simple desire to travel into a complex paragraph that is soundtracked by the anxiety of having to deal with racist travel visas, immigration policies and the realities of settler colonialism.

Port of Memory
Kamal Aljafari • 62 min • Palestine/Germany/France • 2009

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.

Note on the program: TQFF has invited queer Palestinian-Jordanian artist Tara Hakim to curate and write the programme notes for two programmes this year: Port of Memory + I Would Like to Visit, and Terrance of the Sea + Abgad Hawaz. While not all the films in this program are queer in theme or created by queer directors, TQFF remains committed to showcasing works that reflect the diversity and nuances of queer sexuality and gender beyond the cisgender binary. As queers, we also recognize the necessity of opposing systems of apartheid, imperialism, and ethnic cleansing. Israeli tactics of socio-economic deprivation severely restrict Palestinian cinema, and our friends at Queer Cinema for Palestine have done invaluable work bringing queer Palestinian cinema to Toronto audiences. In order to work alongside their efforts without repetition, TQFF and Tara have sought out other films highlighting Palestinians subjectivity, which remains underrepresented in mainstream media.