Seif gheir aadi

It's the summer of 2006. The war between Israel and Lebanon is raging. In the Arab neighborhood of Ramla known as the Ghetto, a mysterious silhouette attacks a car with a stone. The owner of the car happens to be part of Kamal Aljafari's family and installs a CCTV camera to gather evidence of the crime. Years pass and the images captured by the surveillance camera are found and eventually become this film: an unusual summer indeed.
Half way between a thriller and an intimate diary, AN UNUSUAL SUMMER offers us a concise fresco of an entire population. The street corner upon which the camera is trained suddenly becomes the center of a universe, where passersby appear and disappear and seem to exist only at the moment they cross the frame. Thanks to its elegant work of editing and reframing, the characters move around a few key elements like ghosts, a car, a tree, a house: a choreography of souls, each with a story and each living under the constant threat of war. Aljafari's text is our guide through the film and leads us into a world where the traces of war and occupation are invisible, yet still very present in people's lives. In the background of all this perpetual movement, there stands a fig tree, a monument to the strength of the Palestinian population. (Rebecca Depas)

Kamal Aljafari: VISIT IRAQ (2003, K), THE ROOF (2006), PORT OF MEMORY (2010), RECOLLECTION (2015) IT’S A LONG WAY FROM AMPHIOXUS (2019)