Elia Suleiman’s a man of few words, so we can be sure that the ones he does use have been chosen carefully. “What I am to do in this film, I actually accomplished,” the Palestinian film-maker told Indiewire upon the US release of his debut feature Chronicle of a Disappearance (now streaming on Netflix) in 1997. “Even when they object to the nature of the presentation of the film, a lot of people have delayed questioning. They don’t know how to invent the language that must deal immediately … There is no ready-made rhetoric that they could say, ‘I don’t agree with you on this or that.’ I mean, what can they pick on? My mother walking across the room?”
Like so many dissidents before him, Suleiman derives more power from silence than screams. In the breakout that earned him the prize for best first film at the Venice film festival and literally put Palestinian cinema on the map as the nation’s first production to receive a Stateside theatrical run, the writer-director-actor-producer prefers to play his politics close to the vest. He anticipated the controversy part and parcel to any work critical of the Israeli occupation, and pre-empted the pushback by couching his resentments in unremarkable moments. There’s no speechifying, no harrowing depiction of the bitterness or cruelty still festering around the West Bank; Suleiman thumbs his nose at the prospect with a scene that sees his onscreen avatar ES take the podium at a conference, only to be interrupted by whining feedback every time he gears up to speak.
