Kamal Aljafari’s filmography includes Recollection [2015, PS/DE, 70], Port of Memory [2009] and The Roof [2006].  He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York, and in 2009/2010 was the 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 City, and from 2011 to 2013 he was a senior lecturer and head of the directing program for the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB), Berlin.  He is the recipient of numerous film prizes and art grants.  In 2013, Aljafari received the art medal of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.  A retrospect of his work is planned for 2016 at Lussas Film Festival in France and at the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Gil Hochberg, is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her work focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, and Visual Culture. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory andgender, Language Politics, Hebrew Literature, Mediterraneanism, and Minority literatures. Her book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her lastest published book is a study of the Visual Politics of the Israeli-Palestinian entitled Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Departmnet of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, and Dean of Humanities.