On Archival Sabotage: An Interview with Kamal Aljafari

Kamal Aljafari is an agitator, always looking for new ways to turn the clichéd grammar of cinematic memoirs against itself; to talk about personal and national disenfranchisement in the same breath. His earlier films were examinations of his home towns of Ramleh and Jaffa, often revolving around the physical structure of the family house itself and creating an architectural cinema of dispossession. His latest film, Paradiso, XXXI, 108—the focus of our conversation — is his first to broaden its scope significantly, to examine, and subvert, Israeli militarism directly. It challenges Israeli military propaganda, manipulating the state’s highly choreographed representation of its creation myth and reconstituting it into an absurd fantasy that reveals the unconvincing duplicity of the official state narrative.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is reliant on the continual construction and reconstruction of this propaganda: a constant manipulation of past and future events, a never-ending constellation of increasingly convoluted lies. This is more than simply a matter of public relations. Israel aims its rifles not only at the Palestinian narrative but at the people and places who keep that narrative alive, assassinating poets, burning archives, and bombing and demolishing universities. In this landscape of erasure, simply making Palestinian films is an act of resistance: a declaration of our cultural and historical continuity. Aljafari participates in this resistance not only as a political act but in an attempt to form a unique Palestinian film vernacular, liberated from the cinema industry’s commercial requirements of narrative, plot, and character arc. His films are fragmented, non-linear, unpredictable: certainly the only possible way to represent the Palestine of today.

Although made in 2022, it’s impossible to watch Paradiso, XXXI, 108 now and not see the same military maneuvers represented in the film currently being used to perpetrate the genocide of Palestinians. And in that link is a contradiction, because — for all its horrific associations — the film presents Israel’s military, and the mythology surrounding it, as one big, pathetic joke. It is, at times, an uncomfortable joke, but nevertheless, it is a defiant laugh in the face of genocide. A laugh with tears streaming down our faces and the promise from our lips that you can kill our people but you can never break our spirit.

— Saeed Taji Farouky