Port of Memory

LOUIS MARCORELLES AWARD

Walled-up houses, notice of expulsion, immobile consumers in a café, an eccentric individual driving round on his scooter shouting, a sick old woman and her daughter glued to a television set, stray cats, the anxiety of a couple tetanised by the sombre certainties of the future, and to inish, a cemetery overlooking the sea and night drawing in on the terraces. The picture that Kamal Aljafari paints for us of Jafa the Palestinian is that of a shrinking skin slowly closing in on its resigned inhabitants, who are crushed by fate, whatever they say about it, as if the slow-motion repetition of everyday gestures were their only way of suspending the course of time, of delaying the inevitable. (Yann Lardeau)