The Time That Remains

Seven years after Divine Intervention (2002), the film that won him a special jury prize at Cannes, Elia Suleiman is back with The Time That Remains. No one is better at capturing the slapstick quality of life in Israel, with its disrupted relations between Israelis and Palestinians, than Suleiman. He based the film on diaries that his father wrote on his deathbed in Nazareth. As always, Suleiman plays himself, and his camera records without commentary the bizarre mutual misunderstandings and harassments between the different population groups. In this film, he mirrors the moral and intellectual routes that he and his father had to take during their lives. His father started as a Palestinian resistance hero during the Israeli war of independence in 1948, but later lost any will to protest. The son initially accepted the political situation, but later chose to be an activist, before he finally decided as a film maker to adopt a more critical and observing attitude toward the conflict.