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Cinema
The time that remains
In person, Elia Suleiman is an intriguing contrast to the parts he plays in his films: the voluble, greying-haired man with the mobile, humorous face becomes, on screen, the wide-eyed, mute observer of life’s absurdities – of which, in the complexities of Palestine’s situation, Suleiman sees many. His films are praised for revealing the black comedy in everyday life: the humour of oppression, simultaneously moving and funny.
By Alexa Dalby
Director Suleiman is the first celebrity in Palestine’s burgeoning film culture. In 1996, Chronicle of a Disappearance was the first Palestinian film to get a US release and he gained international acclaim and awards with Divine Intervention in 2002, the first Palestinian film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival. His third film, The Time That Remains, is a homage to his parents, inspired by his father’s diaries and his mother’s letters to family who left Palestine in 1948. “When you live in a sensitive area like my country, politics are simply a part of life … I felt my challenge was to make a film in which there was no history lesson to be learned. I focused on moments of intimacy of a family, hoping for nothing more than to give pleasure to the audience and to achieve a certain cinematic truth. If I reach this goal, the film becomes universal and the world itself becomes Palestine.”
Critics raved when it was screened in Cannes’ Official Selection: “One of the most unexpected successes here is a deadpan Palestinian comedy .... read that again: a deadpan Palestinian comedy … A movie whose loveliness grows on you … Scenes are repeated or slightly revised, and the geometric shot composition is exquisite …”
The film focuses on Suleiman’s family in Nazareth: “I truly went naked! I went as deep as possible into my private, intimate life, with all the joy and pain that involves.” Through layers of vignettes – “moments of truth” – small events, running jokes, sight gags and ironic observations, it moves from present to past and back again.
An Iraqi soldier, come to liberate too late in 1948, marches in all directions except the right one. The mayor, signing the surrender, asks what the date is. There comedy but also violence. Suleiman’s father, a resistance fighter, acts with bravery, but by 1970 has acquiesced to occupation and domesticity. The film is dedicated to the “present absentees”, Palestinians who remain in their own land. Suleiman left for America at 17 and now lives in Paris, but his parents stayed. He says, “I appropriated from my personal context being present and absent, someone who is an outsider and an insider,” and this informs his screen persona – the powerless, impassive onlooker, the tabula rasa on which the audience can write its own response.
As young Elia grows up, we see the contradictions of his schooling and the reactions of adults to life under occupation. His father is comically harassed by bored Israeli soldiers when night fishing. A suicidal neighbour regularly dowses himself with petrol: Elia’s mother reminds his father to put his cigarette out before going to help. Elia watches as his health fails. When adult Elia returns to Nazareth, his reunion with friends is choreographed to a tango soundtrack. His mother is now an ailing widow. So closely does the film follow life that when she died, he rewrote the script.
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