Exploring Elia Suleiman and his unique contribution to Palestinian cinema
In the recent years of escalation of warfare between Israel and Palestine, the conflict has become unrelentingly atrocious, with concerned citizens around the world rightly protesting the monstrosities occurring in the Middle East. Yet, while the conflict may have heightened in October 2023, Palestine and Israel have been warring for generations, as several recently popularised documentaries, including 2011’s compelling Five Broken Cameras, well demonstrates.
Documentaries are often the go-to medium by which information is consumed in the world of cinema. However, to truly grasp the extent of the Israeli occupation, the films of director Elia Suleiman may prove far more compelling. Using comedy and experimental narrative tales to express his own anger as a Palestinian filmmaker, Suleiman’s political comments are pointed and passionate.
Immediately presenting his political intentions upon his inception to the industry back in 1990, Suleiman’s debut picture, Introduction to the End of an Argument, criticised the representation of the Palestinian people by Western media, with the film gathering enough attention to kickstart his early career. His follow-up, Chronicle of a Disappearance, remains one of Palestine’s most celebrated movies, with the question of national identity being explored in a fascinating statement that was distributed across the world.
Anything but linear in its presentation, Suleiman’s film was a daring portrait of the contemporary Israel-Palestine conflict, with humour being used to emphasise the humanity of his perspective. Drawing parallels with the detached vignettes and absurdist humour seen in the movies of the Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, Suleiman’s style was distinctive in its field, magnetising itself to audiences beyond the borders of the Middle East.
As his reputation grew, so did his filmography, following Chronicle of a Disappearance with Divine Intervention in 2002, the director’s most critically celebrated piece of cinema. Once again, using absurdity to explore complex themes inextricably tied to the conflict, including that of identity in a community of people who have been displaced from their land, the film gained adoration at Cannes thanks to its novel approach to complex subject matter.
Accessing a deeper human truth to the conflict that few documentaries can match, Divine Intervention tells the story of two lovers from Palestine who are separated by a checkpoint, with much of the tale being filled with peculiar skits and vignettes of life. Quirky and consumable, the work isn’t unlike that of popular European filmmakers like Jacques Tati, Aki Kaurismäki and the aforementioned Andersson, with his slow, meditative style giving a universal humanity to his tales.
“What drives you to actually start daydreaming is definitely a desire of some sort,” Suleiman told Mubi in 2021, “When you stare at the world, you are also at the same time staring at yourself, in a kind of a deep internal voyage. It’s like when you sit alone in a cafe, and you are watching the passerby – you’re evidently thinking of yourself while you are doing this, and what you’re thinking about is your own position within the real world…You are just basically asking yourself the same existential questions that we all ask ourselves.”
Resonating with global audiences, this absurdist introspection was mimicked in 2009’s The Time That Remains and 2019’s It Must Be Heaven, with both films continuing to toy with slow, contemplative comedy to translate the struggles of living in contemporary Palestine. As a consistently defiant filmmaker and voice for political transformation, Suleiman may just be one of the 21st century’s most important filmmakers.
