Le rituel contre l’oubli : une archéologie du quotidien dans Port Of Memory de Kamal Aljafari

In his second feature Port of Memory (2009), Kamal Aljafari follows his family after having received an order of evacuation from their house in Ajami, a once rich neighborhood of Jaffa coasting the sea. The film opens on a scene where their lawyer announces having misplaced the deed of the house that Aljafari’s family had entrusted him with. Lacking the necessary official documents, Aljafari poses the filming of the everyday gesture as a ritual, indicating the conflictual belonging of Palestinians to their land. This paper aims to question the role of rituals in writing the story of a traumatized place in relation to the memory of an uprooted community. Taking an interest in the rituals of the everyday, Port of Memory anchors Aljafari’s family in their own house, presenting itself as a concrete means of resistance against erasure.