SYNOPSIS
Following an act of vandalism, the Palestinian filmmaker’s father decides to install a surveillance camera to record the scenes unfolding in front of the house. A personal and eminently political fresco.
SUMMARY
Following an act of vandalism, the filmmaker’s father decides to install a surveillance camera to record the scenes unfolding in front of the house. Everyday family life, the neighbors going to work, and the children at school–this experimental film captures fleeting moments of poetry. In the background, the daily choreography of the Ramla (a Palestinian city in Israel), comes to the surface. Composing with this visual material of low-definition aesthetics, finely punctuated with sound effects, Aljafari creates a mechanical diary of a life that scrolls past the window and succeeds with patience and infinite grace in transfiguring a ‘film à dispositif’ based on a security device into a personal and eminently political fresco. “In the distant past, many years ago, in front of this house, there stood a fig tree in a garden, which has now vanished, bulldozed into memory, and swept up by History and Time.”