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.”
Aljafari again draws from the lived experience of his kin in Port of Memory, following the reaction of his family when they receive an order to evacuate their home in Ajami, Jaffa's once-wealthy sea-front neighbourhood. Their lives and those of the other residents are thrown into disarray because they don't have access to the means to effectively fight back. Radically poetic, Port of Memory is a reflection on the absurdity of being at once absent and present, blending the mundane gestures of everyday life and collective memory.
Kamal Aljafari (b. 1972) is originally from Ramleh, Palestine. He graduated from the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. His film Visit Iraq (2003) he received the Visual Art Prize of the City of Cologne (2004) and an award from the Sundance Documentary Fund (2007). In 2005, he was awarded a fellowship by the German Kunstfonds. The Roof won the Best International On Screen (Video) Award at the Images Festival in Toronto (2008) and also the award for best soundtrack at the FID Marseille documentary festival in France. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at Colgate University in New York. Through 2010, he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. His work has shown at many international film festivals and will be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, March 2010.

一位老妇人倚在年轻人身边，旁边坐着一本黄皮书，问道：“他们在这里分发什么？“数字”，他回答。在柏林的候诊室里，金属和木制的座位被钉在地上，人们从海上出来后就到了。他们在这里等待。
Kamal Aljafari的新短片再一次颠覆了时间，质疑了一个系统中生命的意义，在这个系统中，人类被减少到一个数字，一个人未来的价值是通过灰色走廊中的应用来衡量的。走进这个黑洞，在那里骨头和肉已经成为排队系统中的数字。以超现实的幽默，这部电影观察我们的存在的起源与我们被定义的未来。从我们的起点到今天官僚主义迷宫的混乱，我们变成了什么？离文昌鱼很远，我们都是从那里来的。
An old woman leans to the young man with the yellow book sitting next to her and asks, “What are they distributing here?” “Numbers”, he replies. In Berlin’s waiting rooms, where metal and wooden seats are nailed to the ground, people arrive after emerging from the seas. Here they wait.
Kamal Aljafari’s new short film once again collapses time, questioning the meaning of life in a system in which humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways. Step into this black hole, where bones and flesh have become numbers in a queuing system. With surreal humor, this film observes the origins of our being versus the future of how we are defined. What have we become from our point of origin until today’s chaos of bureaucratic mazes? It’s a long way from Amphioxus, we all came from there.