Port Of Memory
(Minaa Elzakira )

In Our Music, Jean-Luc Godard shows two photographs, each representing a distinct group of men, with their feet in the water. He identifies the first photo of Jews coming into Israel, as moving towards fiction. On the other, that he presents as its reverse shot, Palestinians rejected to the sea, ingoing documentary. We can say that the melancholy and documentary style writing of Port of Memory dialogues from the inside with the fiction wall described by Godard. The ruins of the historic city of Jaffa hollowed out and roofed by the growing shadow of Tel Aviv (lets not forget the last shot of Anat Even’s Closure in competition last year) a few walled houses guaranteed to demolition next to expropriation notices plastered on the doors, a few stray cats and some ghost-like coffee customers. While waiting for their deportation, only the gestures of a sick old woman and her daughter bear the marks of a ritual belonging to this place when a team of Israeli TV disrupts to work on other scenes. Any intention of revolt seems suffocated by the absurdity that underlines the fil : can we be simultaneously present and absent ? The answer will be given by fiction and sung in Hebrew in an Israeli film shot on the streets of Jaffa in 1973. Simple reverse shot irony ? JB