A Chronicle of Love and Pain

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention, a political satire, will show in the city on Thursday.

Nominated for the Golden Palm and winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in 2002, the film also won awards at the European Film Awards.

The film opens with a scene of Palestinian teens chasing Santa Claus and stabbing him with a knife-an extreme rejection of Western culture.

It then follows the relation between ES, played by the director himself, and a beautiful Palestinian girl, played by Manal Khader. Due to the political crisis between the towns of Ramallah and Jerusalem where they live, the lovers are torn apart and always separated by a checkpoint area.

The film also reflects the oppression by the Nazis and others in Eastern Europe.
As film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times says, “‘Divine Intervention’ is a mordant and bleak comedy, almost without dialogue, about Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Its characters live their daily lives in ways that are fundamentally defined by the divisions between them, and the scene with the most tension simply involves two drivers, one Israeli, one Palestinian, who lock eyes at a traffic light.

Neither will look away. In their paralysis, while the light turns green and motorists behind them start to honk, the film sums up the situation in a nutshell.”

According to Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, the film is “a series of surreal vignettes of ordinary life in the Occupied Territories.

A man waits at a bus stop for a bus that never comes. Another man throws his garbage into the next-door lady’s garden, and with a straight face complains about unneighbourliness when she throws it back. A group of men appear to be beating someone up with baseball bats—Suleiman’s subsequent sight gag reveals that it’s not a man they’re pummelling, but the truth is somehow even more disturbing.”