Quiet Resistance: Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention

Following a three-minute opening sequence that is completely devoid of dialogue, the first words uttered in Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s Yadon ilaheyya (Divine Intervention, 2002) are “What a fucked-up morning.” Instantly setting the tone for the series of loosely connected vignettes that comprise the first third of the film, this statement encapsulates the comic absurdity of daily life that unfolds. In this bizarre vein, the film introduces a man who repeatedly stands at a bus stop, waiting for a bus that he knows will never arrive. We also meet a young, aspiring soccer player who shows off his impressive technical skills before losing his ball on a neighbour’s roof. The neighbour returns the ball, but only after he has punctured it with a knife. Another man in the same neighbourhood persistently throws his garbage into his neighbour’s garden, and then tells her that her behaviour is “shameful” and lacks “respect” when she throws it back into his yard. The petty squabbles and microaggressions that frame these quotidian interactions are given further significance by the film’s socio-historical setting of the Second Intifada in Nazareth, a city located in the north of Israel that has the state’s largest Arab population. Before Suleiman’s film enters into the main segment of the narrative, he establishes a space in which the contested borders, internal disagreements and forced occupation that characterise the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine are inescapably embedded into every aspect of life. 

As the second film in what critics and scholars have labelled Suleiman’s “Palestine trilogy”, alongside Segell ikhtifa (Chronicle of a Disappearance, 1996) and The Time that Remains (2009), Divine Intervention is a key text in the disrupted history of Palestinian cinema.¹ Controversially denied entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars on the basis that the film originated “from a country not formally recognised by the United Nations,” Divine Intervention was notably the first Palestinian film to be included in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, where it won both the Jury Prize and the International Critics Prize.² Subtitled “A Chronicle of Love and Pain,” the film is purposefully decentred and fragmented in its cinematic representation of life under an oppressive regime. Starting with the episodic accounts of the ghettoised neighbourhoods of Nazareth, the film shifts focus to the tender and silent romance between a man from East Jerusalem known as E.S. (played by Suleiman), whose father has just been hospitalised following a heart attack, and an unnamed woman (Manal Khader) from Ramallah. In an interview following the film’s release, Suleiman described Divine Intervention as being “about a man who’s losing his father, who is dying, and he’s losing the woman, who’s on the other side of the border. But it’s not really about that, in fact.”³ The paradox at the heart of Suleiman’s statement – that the film is about one thing, but is also about something else – emphasises the importance of avoiding a passive approach to observing what takes place on the screen and attending to the different layers of signification woven into the film.

In defining Palestinian cinema as a “cinema of dispossession”, Stathis Gourgouris highlights the underlying issue of displacement in Palestinian films when he asserts that “the cinematic capacity to create images of an historical past and a projected future, […] crucial dimensions in any definition of national cinema, is severely pressured and perhaps, to a large extent, curtailed.”⁴ The problem of representing nationhood for a people that are, at best, marginalised, or, at worst, deprived of any real recognition of their existence is manifest in the elliptical composition of Divine Intervention. In presenting the film as a series of vignettes, Suleiman highlights the difficulties in forming a cohesive narrative within the boundaries of Israeli-occupied Arab territories. Although the love story at the centre of the film draws attention to the geo-political imposition of divisions that prevent the couple from being together, the structure of the film itself replicates what Laura Junka-Aikio argues is the struggle of representing Palestinian experience and “the impossibility of collective articulation.”⁵ 

The issue of articulation is further emphasised through the presence of the mute character of E.S., who not only features in Divine Intervention, but appears in all of Suleiman’s films. Often compared to Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, E.S.’s silence could, on the one hand, be interpreted as voicelessness and, on the other, as vaguely amused apathy regarding the state of the world.⁶ To this end, although Divine Intervention deals with serious themes, Suleiman does so through a lens of comedic disarmament. In the film’s occasionally fantastical diegetic reality, an apricot kernel can destroy a tank and the drive-by fire bombing of a home is met with bored nonchalance by the homeowner, who calmly puts out the fire with an extinguisher. The rendering of violent action as a surreal spectacle crucially never changes the deadpan expression of E.S., who is the main witness to the film’s bloodless, burlesque atrocities. Rasha Salti argues that, “The depth of his silence is at once the depth of the horror and despair, the symbolic muteness of Palestinians, and a refusal to speak in the conventional political and ideological idioms. The viewer has to speak. The viewer is compelled to share in the burden and responsibility of describing, witnessing, what he/she sees”.⁷ Salti’s call to the viewer to speak is clearly intertwined with Suleiman’s strategy to implicate the viewer in the construction of meaning in his films. As he commented in an interview, “I do want the audience to coproduce the image. I want to leave an image open for interpretation. If I were to make an image that is simply linear and only telling my truth, it would be presumptuous. I try to escape any one truth”.⁸

Suleiman’s privileging of multiple truths also gestures towards the themes of transgression and transcendence that proliferate the film. This is particularly realised in the scenes featuring E.S. and the woman, whose intimacy can only extend to the gentle caress of their hands as they sit in E.S.’s car at the al-Ram checkpoint. However, this changes during their third encounter when the woman joins E.S. in his car and he inflates a red balloon adorned with the face of Palestinian political leader Yasser Arafat. After E.S. releases the balloon from the car’s sunroof, it innocently glides past the checkpoint. Creating confusion for the guards, the diversion allows E.S. and the woman to surreptitiously cross the border together. The viewer is not made privy to the outcome of their act of transgression, following instead the journey of the red balloon as it triumphantly floats past Israeli flags towards the Al-Aqsa Mosque, before resting on the golden peak of the Dome of the Rock. 

In creating a moment that blurs fantasy and reality, Suleiman also proposes an unexpected reappropriation of space. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi argue that in Palestinian films of the 1990s and 2000s, “public space is blocked, the private space is missing or destroyed, and the only place left intact is the border”.⁹ They further contend that borders are “a sign of oppression characterised by an Israeli definition of Palestinian as a non-existent, split or broken identity”.¹⁰ However, in Divine Intervention, this relegation of Palestinian selfhood to geographical margins not only indicates dispossession, but also offers a potential space of transcendence that is encapsulated in the free movement of the balloon. Suleiman has commented that, “The fact that I make a film is a sign of hope. Yes, it’s a landscape of despair, but if it’s truly despair, why do I make a film in it? I make films because I’m always hopeful that something will save such a place”.¹¹ This is the power of Suleiman’s film, in that it cinematically proposes an intervention into the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Cinema may not be divine but, in Suleiman’s hands, it is a crucial beacon of hope.

Yadon ilaheyya/Divine Intervention (2002 France/Morocco/Germany/ Palestine 92 minutes)

Prod. Co: Arte France Cinéma, Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Gimages Prod: Humbert Balsan Dir: Elia Suleiman Scr: Elia Suleiman Phot: Marc-André Batigne Ed: Véronique Lange Prod Des: Miguel Markin, Denis Renault Cos Des: Eve-Marie Arnault

Cast: Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader, Nayef Fahoum Daher, George Ibrahim

Endnotes