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Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora: an interview with Elia Suleiman.

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Invoking the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said pays homage to "the need to reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile." In recent years, the films of a much different representative of Palestinian culture, Elia Suleiman, have depicted life in contemporary Israel and the Occupied Territories with a wry detachment engendered by his years of "voluntary exile" in New York and Paris. Suleiman's detachment, however, does not preclude him from being angry and passionate. His stripped-down film esthetic, which is considerably indebted to European and Asian art cinema, coexists with a savvy political and social consciousness.

From his initial short films to his most recent feature (Divine Intervention--winner of the Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), Suleiman has mingled quasiau to biographical ruminations with concerted efforts to make films that are both politically committed and nondidactic. Homage by Assassination (1992), for example, is a diary film that filters a critique of the 1991 Gulf War through multilayered personal anecdotes. For critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stain, the film's shifts in tone--gallows humor mixed with despair--personify Suleiman's lucid portrait of "cultural disembodiment"-a disembodiment that manifests itself in "multiple failures of communication," which reflect the inevitable contradictions and quandaries of living abroad as a "diasporic subject."

Suleiman's first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), commemorates, with considerable self-irony, his return to Nazareth after years of living in New York. Despite the restrained optimism engendered by the Oslo accords, the characteristically deadpan humor is noticeably tinged with melancholy and frustration. Suleiman uses himself as the butt of more than a few self-deflating jokes--particularly a scene in which a faulty microp hone prevents the returning filmmaker from introducing his work to a Palestinian audience. The little annoyances and peculiarities of daily life--a young Palestinian woman's futile attempts to rent an apartment in Jerusalem, the marketing of biblical souvenirs in a Nazareth gift shop-become barometers of a greater political malaise.

If the humor is more barbed and even more despondent in Divine Intervention, it is undoubtedly a result of how the Middle East political climate has worsened during the intervening years. Suleiman again appears as a thinly fictionalized version of himself (E.S.), a bemused observer of his compatriots' inner rage. Opening with the incongruous spectacle of Santa Claus staggering towards his death after being stabbed in Nazareth, the film proceeds to relish the comic dyspepsia of E.S.'s father, a man whose ire towards his neighbors sums up the internecine warfare and undiluted pessimism that plagues Palestinians during the Sharon era.

Several of Divine Intervention's signature sequences poke savage, quasiabsurdist fun at the media-generated images of Palestinians as nothing more than unapologetic terrorists. After E.S. casually throws a peach pit out of his car, an Israeli tank explodes. A helium-filled balloon emblazoned with Yasir Arafat's picture hovers over an ominous checkpoint and becomes as much of a threat to the Israeli military as a cache of bombs. And, most spectacularly--and controversially--E.S.'s beautiful girlfriend is magically transformed into a Palestinian Ninja warrior who battles Israeli soldiers with superhuman panache. Although it is evident to most viewers that these sequences function more like parodies of common Palestinian wish-fulfillment fantasies than endorsements of actual violence, critics with an axe to grind have viewed them as wholehearted paeans to the gory intransigence of suicide bombers.

Cineaste interviewed Suleiman on the eve of Divine Intervention's American premiere at the 2002 New York Film Festival, He proved eager to discuss everything from the nature of Palestinian identity and the history of the state of Israel to his "conceptually Jewish" humor and admiration for Primo Levi and Walter Benjamin.

Richard Porton

Cineaste: Your short films are quite different, at least stylistically, from your features, which highlight a string of interrelated comic vignettes.

Ella Suleiman: There's a consistent pattern of development in my films; it's part of a learning process. Maybe as you learn more and gain confidence, you stretch-and unleash-yourself further as you feel more comfortable with the camera. And you don't censor yourself as much. I've been asked to explain the difference between Divine Intervention and my previous feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance. The current film just takes the premise of Chronicle and adjusts it to the more...