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Film: “The Roof” (Al Sateh)
May 08, 20257:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
7:00 p.m.
5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe
Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper
documentation. You may only receive one discount per ticket. Sales in
advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m.
Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on
the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour
before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card).
Assigned seats with tickets.
Screening in Original Version with English subtitles. Discussion in English with consecutive translation into Spanish.
On Thursday, May 8, Casa Árabe will be screening this documentary, the award-winning first feature film by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, with whom we will be holding a discussion afterwards. Buy your ticket now and come and watch it!
To what extent can the real and figurative materiality of an image become an abstraction, or even potentially a specter? This question evokes aesthetic and ethical issues which, in Kamal Aljafari’s filmmaking, converge towards a territory as real as it is abstract and phantasmagoric: Palestine.
Though Aljafari’s cinema arises from the observation of everyday life which not only coexists in ruin, but also inhabits it, he subsequently transforms these images into traces, echoes, stains, blurs and, in his most recent radical films, pixels that become impossible to capture using notions of the real. The art of transforming the harrowing materiality of the broken walls and destroyed landscapes of an invaded territory into a disembodied immateriality becomes the art of reconfiguring Palestine as a nation, which through moving images finally overcomes the forces that imprison and destroy that very space. It is an act of defiance. In Aljafari’s film, Palestine becomes a shadow which races faster than the body from which it is cast.
The Roof (Al Sateh, 2006, 63′) is the director’s first feature film, with a title that refers to the never-finished roof on his parents’ house. Aljafari is currently in Madrid, in May of 2025, to take part in the retrospective series on his work being put on by the Filmoteca Española as a part of DocumentaMadrid, which in turns forms part of the event series Culture for Peace, given the support of Spain’s Minister of Culture, with the participation of Casa Árabe.
Kamal Aljafari (Ramla, 1972) is a Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist who graduated from the Kunsthochschule für Medien (Academy of Media Arts) in Cologne, Germany. His films include the short-subject film Visit Iraq (2003) and the award-winning feature film The Roof (2006), a personal, silent testimonial about the history and daily oppression of Palestinians living in Israel, as well as Recollection (2015) and Port of Memory (2009). Aljafari’s films have been screened at numerous film festivals, including Locarno, Turin, Toronto, Rotterdam and Marseille, as well as museums such as the Tate Modern and MoMA in New York. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York, and from 2009 to 2010 he was a Benjamin White Whitney Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center. In 2010, he taught film at The New School in New York, and from 2011 to 2013 he became a senior lecturer and head of the directing program at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin. He was bestowed with numerous film awards and art fellowships, including scholarships from the Kunstfonds and the Kunstiftung NRW, as well as the Friedrich Vordemberge Visual Arts Award of the City of Cologne, Germany. In 2013, he received the art medal of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. In 2016, he was named a member of the jury of the Turin Film Festival and a retrospective of his work was held at the Lussas Film Festival (France) and at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal.
Though Aljafari’s cinema arises from the observation of everyday life which not only coexists in ruin, but also inhabits it, he subsequently transforms these images into traces, echoes, stains, blurs and, in his most recent radical films, pixels that become impossible to capture using notions of the real. The art of transforming the harrowing materiality of the broken walls and destroyed landscapes of an invaded territory into a disembodied immateriality becomes the art of reconfiguring Palestine as a nation, which through moving images finally overcomes the forces that imprison and destroy that very space. It is an act of defiance. In Aljafari’s film, Palestine becomes a shadow which races faster than the body from which it is cast.
The Roof (Al Sateh, 2006, 63′) is the director’s first feature film, with a title that refers to the never-finished roof on his parents’ house. Aljafari is currently in Madrid, in May of 2025, to take part in the retrospective series on his work being put on by the Filmoteca Española as a part of DocumentaMadrid, which in turns forms part of the event series Culture for Peace, given the support of Spain’s Minister of Culture, with the participation of Casa Árabe.
Kamal Aljafari (Ramla, 1972) is a Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist who graduated from the Kunsthochschule für Medien (Academy of Media Arts) in Cologne, Germany. His films include the short-subject film Visit Iraq (2003) and the award-winning feature film The Roof (2006), a personal, silent testimonial about the history and daily oppression of Palestinians living in Israel, as well as Recollection (2015) and Port of Memory (2009). Aljafari’s films have been screened at numerous film festivals, including Locarno, Turin, Toronto, Rotterdam and Marseille, as well as museums such as the Tate Modern and MoMA in New York. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York, and from 2009 to 2010 he was a Benjamin White Whitney Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Film Study Center. In 2010, he taught film at The New School in New York, and from 2011 to 2013 he became a senior lecturer and head of the directing program at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin. He was bestowed with numerous film awards and art fellowships, including scholarships from the Kunstfonds and the Kunstiftung NRW, as well as the Friedrich Vordemberge Visual Arts Award of the City of Cologne, Germany. In 2013, he received the art medal of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. In 2016, he was named a member of the jury of the Turin Film Festival and a retrospective of his work was held at the Lussas Film Festival (France) and at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal.
Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari