Port of Memory - directed by Kamal Aljafari - Palestine - 2010

from Distant Interiors: Three Works by Kamal Aljafari, presented by the Cinema Project at the Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton.

Tuesday June 15 and Wednesday June 16, 6:45 p.m. Director in attendance.

The Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, visiting the Clinton Street Theater this Tuesday and Wednesday courtesy of Portland's Cinema Project, is known to me through one film, his most recent, 2010's Port of Memory. Having taken in its hour-long trance three times, and done a bit of research on the city of Jaffa, where it takes place, I can say that the filmmaker has much to say about Palestinian life in Jaffa, all of which is felt but not much of which I can pinpoint, as he's decided to say it all obliquely.

More interested in crumbling buildings and ambling boredom than plot, Port of Memory is a bit like a walk down a crowded street on a sunny day after a few drinks: Sights and sounds blend together serenely, time flows in no necessary order, and what you are thinking about what you see and hear is not necessarily relevant to your getting where you need to go.

That isn't to say that you don't actually get there, or that paying attention isn't rewarding: The end of Port of Memory leaves a cumulative feeling for a particular location, a neighborhood and a city, that I haven't been offered by many films. It just gets there by way of minute-long shots that take in the change of light on the outside of a building, and the observation of rituals like hand-washing, the walk to a neighbor's house and slicing vegetables. Shot on film, this is a movie too beautiful and full of curiosity to worry much about plot.

What there is of that concerns a Palestinian man, Salim (Salim Bilbesi), who is being swindled out of the house he's owned for 40 years. The swindlers are never explicitly identified, though the fact that the movie takes place in Jaffa, a port city that once encompassed and is now dwarfed by Tel Aviv, suggests that they are Israelis moving in on Palestinian real estate. Their method is to simply claim that Salim and his family are squatting, then declare his house theirs. Since he is torturously unable to locate the forty-year-old papers which prove the ownership of his home, Salim spends his time pre-eviction contemplating his options, but mostly sleeping and wandering the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, his wife and her mother spend aimless time in what are probably their last days in the home. The mother is sick and only occasionally interested in the life around her, the wife straightens the house and compulsively washes her hands. Both seem almost too bored to be frightened of eviction, and the fact that they pray in a Christian style and watch movies about Jesus pegs them as among Jaffa's religious minority,  thus likely to be even more at odds with the changing city if, or once, they find themselves homeless.

Demolition and construction seem to be the rule of neighborhood life around Salim's family and the people he passes. Outside of his disputed house, we travel with various unnamed, finely observed Jaffans - an excitable Vespa rider, seemingly suffering from the same kind of helpless frustration as Salim; the patrons of a slow-moving cafe, who watch Chuck Norris action movies that look like they've used Jaffa as a film studio; and a briefly seen group of land developers - all ambling through a city, or a few neighborhoods, that Aljafari paints as dying.

Port of Memory is not quite a slice of life, more a beautifully composed fragment of a crumbling neighborhood in a quickly changing city. The style of deadpan observation is perfect for this view of life in stasis and a comment on the strange kind of imprisonment that Israel has cast upon Palestine.

From the Venice Film Festival to a teaching position at Harvard, Aljafari has been around the world with this and two previous films, the multi award-winning The Roof (2006) and Visit Iraq (2003), both also screening at the Clinton Street this week. These aren't movies available in video stores, nor are they likely to resurface in major theaters any time soon, and even if they did, they're not likely to be accompanied by the director himself. Highly recommended film event.