Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari’s poetic and political film records his journey back to his family and homeland and explores his firm conviction that “home” can be a feeling as well as an actual place. Aljafari’s voyage is less a definite search for memories than an attempt to view the present as a living past. As his camera pans slowly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined, past and present collide. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari has won praise for “raising anecdote to the level of allegory, enabling the film to trace meditative paths and rhythms.”

This film juxtaposes archival footage of archaeological digs in Jerusalem with quotations of Biblical punishment for adultery for an oblique but provocative look at Jerusalem’s status as an ancient city and territory claimed by both Palestine and Israel.

A young Israeli filmmaker reconstructs what she can of the lives and experiences of the former Palestinian residents of two houses now in Israeli hands.