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  • Gries is the word

    Writer/Director James Savoca (Around June, Sleepwalk), pictured right, welcomed actor Jon Gries (Napoleon Dynamite, Jackpot, Around June) to a free mixer at the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking to... more

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Topic: kino21

Sign of the times? James T. Hong's "This Shall Be a Sign" plays Artists' Television Access Wednesday, April 9, alongside Kamal Aljafari's "The Roof." (Photo courtesy Kino21)

Found

"Palestine: Interior/Exterior"

Watching Kamal Aljafari’s astonishing film The Roof (2006)—a work at once explicitly personal, coolly contemplative, and full of coruscating protest—is to recognize a marvelously intuitive artist and the momentum of a larger cinematic movement at the same time. In its hour-long exploration of two Palestinian family homes inside Israel, that of Aljafari’s parents’ house in Ramleh and his grandmother’s house in Jaffa, The Roof recalls the social-psychological landscapes and formal strategies of such filmmakers as Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad and Rashid Masharawi without ever feeling merely derivative of them. Rather, The Roof registers a potent new cinematic voice while offering more proof that today’s Palestinian cinema is one of the most vital anywhere.

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