5:30 p.m.	The Roof Kamal Aljafari (Palestine/Germany, 2006)

Part essayistic meditation, part family portrait, The Roof is an eloquent and understated exploration of physical and psychic place in the context of filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s family history. Returning to his parents’ and grandmother’s homes in Ramleh and Jaffa, now part of Israel, Aljafari uses elegant cinematography, unhurried rhythms, and fragmented narrative to convey how space, time, and history have been molded by politics and Israeli institutionalized neglect. The roof of the title is an absent one, on the unfinished house where his family has lived since their resettlement in 1948, and it functions as a place of waiting marked by constant deferral. Curator Jean-Pierre Rehm has called the film “as much a stylistic as a political manifesto” that “reveals not so much the meaning of an absent roof, but the architecture of identity, place, and present pasts.”

—Irina Leimbacher

• (61 mins, In Arabic, Hebrew, and English with English subtitles, Color, DigiBeta)

Preceded by short:
Visit Iraq (Kamal Aljafari, Germany, 2003). A humorous look at how Geneva residents imagine and project clichés on the recently abandoned office of Iraqi Airlines. (26 mins, In French and Arabic with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

• (Total running time: 87 mins, From the artist)