Aljafari’s films have images that live in my mind every single day. An Unusual Summer has been a film I return to as often as I can, ever since I watched it in 2021, on a night where the solitary yearning to be home felt suffocating. Aljafari has always sought to remind us of the collectiveness of our experience, of the communal history, the shared violence of the lives we live. In grace, in accident, in parcels, in smile, in memory and in the absurdity of the everyday, An Unusual Summer demands that you take a moment to look at the people, to look at the bodies, to look at the humans, souls and experiences that take place every moment of a day, every second of a life. The bodies that persevere with love to the quotidian. We do not need to remind you that we are more than our struggle and our history. But sometimes we do need to remind ourselves, even if we carry it every day, that the usual, is unusual. And that even in the repetitive there is beauty. Even in the pain there is amusement. Even behind the lost pixels there is a fig tree replanting its roots. Witness the moments that make us a life. Collecting and recollecting, looking and memorizing.

Nada El-Omari
Filmmaker and writer