Boston Palestine Film Festival 2008

The Roof is a lingeringly poetic film charting the Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari's journey back to his family and homeland Palestine. Despite the intense political background for the film, its focus is universal, as the director explores the political and social context for his story through a lyrical registration of the human capacity to imagine and create worlds across time and space. At the heart of the film is the belief that home is a feeling as well as a place. Even if a home is bombed to pieces its inhabitants will take it with them wherever they go, unable to leave something so integral to their sense of self. Kamal Aljafari , born in 1972, graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in 2003. In addition to The Roof, he has also made Visit Iraq (2003). He is the recipient of the Visual Art Prize of the city of Cologne for the year 2004 and artist fellowship grants from Kunstfonds and Kunststiftung NRW. His work has been shown internationally at film festivals and art galleries. He is currently in pre-production for his next documentary film, Port of Memory.

Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi and Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan set off on a two-month cinematic journey along the north-south axis of the land of their birth. They trace their trajectory on a map and call it Route 181, after U.N. Resolution 181, which in 1947 called for the partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. All those who cross their path are given voice: men and women, Israelis and Palestinians, young and old— all captured in the everyday life of a sixty-year conflict. By portraying both the divide of the physical landscape and that of the humans who inhabit it, the film elegantly conveys a fuller understanding. Michel Khleifi was born in Nazareth in 1950. In 1970 he traveled to Belgium where he studied television and theater. His films include: Fertile Memory (1980), Ma'loul Celebrates its Destruction (1985), Wedding in Galilee (International Critics Prize, Cannes 1987), Canticle of the Stones (1990), L'Ordre du Jour (1993), and Tale of the Three Jewels (1995). Tale of the Three Jewels is the first feature film ever to be filmed in the Gaza Strip. It was made in the days following the Hebron Massacre and before the arrival of the Palestinian Authority. The Michel Khleifi program was made possible by the participation of the Program in Cinema Studies at Northeastern University.