![]() In Bethlehem, a young boy kicks a soccer ball. Suleiman is rightly compared to French director Jacques Tati, who also used visual patterns and sound effects in his largely silent comedies. That's ironic considering the absurdist treatment of Suleiman's film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which refused to consider "Divine Intervention" as Palestine's submission for Foreign Language film because the UN doesn't recognize Palestine as a country, yet the Academy accepts submissions from Hong Kong, which, the last I checked, was not a country at all. Mixing visually comic, often silent, set pieces with action fantasy and melancholy reflection, Suleiman presents the Israeli/Palestian border as the ground zero of absurdist human tragi-comedy. Elia Suleiman subtitles his film "A Chronicle of Love and Pain" and he shows a real knack for getting to the human foibles upon which great political turmoil are built. ![]()
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