Event Overview This event brings Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari to the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) for a film screening and international symposium examining his work from the perspectives of Middle Eastern politics, data visualization, and moving-image aesthetics. Through screenings of Paradiso, XXXI, 108 and An Unusual Summer, the symposium will explore the political, visual, and cinematic dimensions of Aljafari’s work. The program will conclude with an interactive discussion and Q&A involving the filmmaker, researchers, and members of the audience.
Kamal Aljafari Film Screening Palestine: Archives and Visualization — Memories of Lost Places and the Moving Image
Date & Time: Friday, September 18, 2026, 5:00–8:00 p.m. Doors open: 4:30 p.m. Venue: ENEOS Hall, 1st Floor, South Wing, Building 3, Komaba II Campus, The University of Tokyo [Venue Information] Organized by: RCAST Open Laboratory for Emergence Strategies (ROLES), The University of Tokyo Hidenori Watanave Laboratory, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo Tomomi Ishiyama Laboratory, Tokyo University of the Arts Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) Admission: Free and open to the public (Please note that the event will not be livestreamed) Languages: Japanese and English, with interpretation provided
Essays and Commentaries on Kamal Aljafari’s Films To accompany the screening and symposium, researchers from The University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of the Arts have contributed essays and commentaries on Aljafari’s work. Together, these pieces also serve as an introduction to the films being screened at the event. We warmly invite you to read them in advance:
Doors Open 4:30–5:00 p.m. Welcome & Opening Remarks — Satoshi Ikeuchi, and Hidenori Watanave 5:00–5:05 p.m. Opening Remarks — Kamal Aljafari 5:05–5:10 p.m. Screening: Paradiso, XXXI, 108(19 min.) 5:10–5:30 p.m. Screening: An Unusual Summer(80 min.) 5:30–6:50 p.m. Short Break 6:50–6:55 p.m. Discussion with the Filmmaker and Audience — Kamal Aljafari, Kunitaro Inoue, and Kaine Yunoki 6:55–7:35 p.m. Commentaries — Hidenori Watanave, Tomomi Ishiyama, and Koki Shigenoi 7:35–7:45 p.m. Response — Kamal Aljafari 7:45-7:55 p.m. Closing Remarks — Tomomi Ishiyama 7:55-8:00 p.m. *The program and speaker are subject to change without prior notice.
Films Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (19 min.) Drawing on Israeli military propaganda footage, Aljafari re-edits and reconfigures the images to interrogate the representation of war itself. The enemy never appears on screen; instead, violence emerges as always already a representation of itself. A destructive act of found-footage filmmaking that turns the archive against its original purpose.
An Unusual Summer (80 min.) In 2006, Aljafari’s father installed a surveillance camera in an attempt to identify the person who had been damaging his car. After his father’s death, Aljafari rediscovered the footage. What the camera recorded, however, was not simply a culprit, but the gradually vanishing everyday life of a neighborhood in Ramla. In Aljafari’s hands, an apparatus of surveillance is transformed into an intimate and political book of memory.
Filmmaker Kamal Aljafari Born in Palestine in 1972, Kamal Aljafari studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and is currently based in Berlin. He has taught at The New School in New York and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), and has also been a fellow at Harvard University. Through his distinctive engagement with archival and found footage, Aljafari’s films revisit memories of dispossessed places and expose the structures of violence inscribed within moving images. His work continually asks who has the power to record, preserve, erase, and remake the images through which Palestine is seen and remembered. Kamal Aljafari
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