Elia Suleiman

Elia Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960. He lived in New York from 1981 to 1993, making his first short films there, then returned to Jerusalem, where he helped establish a film and media department at Birzeit University. His features are built from stillness, silence, and long, precisely composed tableaux — a style critics have compared to Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati — through which he examines occupation, exile, and the strangeness of everyday life.

His first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), won the Best First Film prize at the Venice Film Festival. Divine Intervention (2002), a surreal love story staged at a checkpoint, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. The Time That Remains (2009), drawn from his father’s diaries and his mother’s letters, traces one Nazareth family from 1948 to the present; It Must Be Heaven (2019) follows a Suleiman-like observer from Nazareth to Paris and New York, finding Palestine everywhere he goes.

Selected works

• Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996)
• Divine Intervention (2002)
• The Time That Remains (2009)
• It Must Be Heaven (2019)

Sources

• Elia Suleiman — Video Data Bank
• The Time That Remains: Elia Suleiman interview — Sight & Sound, BFI