Composed entirely of footage from Israeli and American fiction features shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s, Aljafari removes the Israeli actors to give the stage to people who appear by chance in the background, including both Palestinians and Iraqi Jews who were settled in the city. In so doing, he performs what he calls “cinematic justice” to the people who were made to appear as extras.
Set in a women’s hair salon in Gaza during a confrontation between the police and a local gangster, effectively trapping the women inside, Degrade blends caricature and reality to emphasize the complexity of life in Gaza where people are afflicted by multiple nodes of pressure and the social space of women is increasingly circumscribed by these pressures.
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