After living in New York for many years, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman returned to Israel in the early 1990s. He used his position as half-insider, half-outsider to analyse the extent to which the Arab population of Israel is losing its national identity. In a witty, ironic mix of narrative, documentary and autobiography, we meet the urban Arab middle class: a retired man who plays computer games while smoking a shisha, two bored men filling bottles of ‘holy water’ from the tap, and a young woman looking for an apartment. All this while grotesque Israeli police cars zoom around looking for terrorists. Elia Suleiman is at the same time director and protagonist, and also plays roles as a character and a viewer, a mediator and narrator – like the film itself, he moves between documentary, fiction, past memories and the present. The film competed in the Tiger Awards Competition in 1997.
