Divine intervention = Chronicle of love and pain

The winner of the International Critic’s Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, “Divine Intervention” is a black comedy that utilises absurdist and surrealistic conventions to represent the psychological and political consequences of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. A Palestinian filmmaker (played by director, Elia Suleiman), who lives in the Occupied Territories, is in love with an Arab woman who lives in Israel. Though they live in the same city, the consequences of occupation mean that they can only meet intermittently at the border checkpoints; and only always under the surveillance of Israeli soldiers. In the meantime, the film director has to contend with a dying father, a film script he is writing that will not settle into any defined order, and with his own fantasies of violence and despair. Around him, “Divine Intervention” situates Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox Christian communities in which tensions between neighbours, petty arguments and squabbles over relationships and personal histories, mirror the larger realities of war, occupation and terror. The audacious strengths of this exhilarating film lie in Suleiman’s ability to find the comic and the absurd in the most extreme and horrific of situations. Beginning with the slaughter of Santa Claus at the dawn of the current millennium, the film proceeds as a series of one-take tableaus, which appear initially random but which develop into an increasingly coherent artistic statement about loss, statehood and identity. “Divine Intervention” is a brave and unique expression of political cinema that finds apt cinematic metaphors for the terror, fear and violence that define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.