Chronicle of a disappearance [NTSC]

Formally daring within its rigorous and restrained aesthetic, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s episodic, elliptical cinematic essay about what it meant to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories in 1996, is constructed in two parts. “Nazareth, A Personal Diary”, set in Suleiman’s birthplace, renders a series of vignettes of everyday life with its rounds of boredom, solitude, complaint, conviviality, and often surreal contradiction. Characters wander in and out of the film, essentially writing their own diary entries. Part two “Jerusalem, A Political Diary” features Suleiman himself as a deadpan internal exile observing events around him: rampant, chaotic tourism in the Holy Land, and the terrors of partition and paranoia which culminate in a personal encounter with the Israeli army during a house raid which is both scary and absurd. According to Suleiman, the film depicts ‘a situation of stasis, characterised by deprivation, disillusionment, and lack of action’. Angry, sad, witty and tender, the film does not provide distinct answers to questions of Palestinian identity. Rather it offers an assortment of possible truths as it explores, through Suleiman’s own eyes, the effects of ghettoisation and marginalisation on the Palestinian psyche. The film won the Best First Feature Award at Venice Film Festival in 1996. In Arabic with English subtitles.