User Reviews

This is an evocative film by Elia Suleiman that was shown at IFC recently. The story takes us back to the city of Nazareth where the director was born. It is a chronicle of the events in that part of the world and the changes that have occurred there. It is basically an account of the life of Mr. Suleiman's parents as they lived the events that go back a number of years in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that befell that area.

Life as an Arab in Israel is examined by Mr. Suleiman at key points as they happened. Fuad, the father in the film, must deal with what comes his way. Life in the city goes through changes as history comes to change things for the family. There is a running joke about food sent from an aunt that no one wants. The main events happened in 1948, as the state of Israel was being born. Later periods take a look at other aspects of the life of what one feels is the family of Mr. Suleiman.

The atmosphere of Nazareth, wit its amazing light is captured by the cinematographer Marc-Andre Batigne. Saleh Bacri, who plays Fuad, shows why he is one of the prominent actors working today. He made quite an impression in "The Band's Visit". The director, Mr. Suleiman shows up toward the end in an enigmatic segment where he seems to be absorbing the history he and his family witnessed in Nazareth.

E.lia Suleiman, director and main protagpnist, lays bare his past and his identiy as an 'Israeli-Arab' who grew up in the occupied territories of the West Bank. Filmed mostly in Ramallah, well known as a hotspot of the first Intifada of the late 1980s and presently seat of the Palestinian National Authority, this is Suleiman's first Israeli, rather than Palestinian, Cannes entry and while it does snot really labour a cause it serves as a powerful memento of the fate of Arab Christians.

We see 50 years of Palestinian history through the lense of a family, from the surrender of the protagonist's grandfather, in his role of major, to the Isreali army, via his father's time in the resistance, to his own youth until he is expelled and has to leave.

He visits years later, his parents having passed on, to visit his ailing aunt, seemingly the one strong tie that binds him to his past, where he is from, and in a way, who he is. Two friends still recognise him, and the three of them spending time together in a street cafe, observing the ever recurring pattern of life locked away in the eternal melancholy of what has been lost, is perhaps one of the most memorable images captured by Suleiman.

The film begins, and ends, with absurdly cast scenes from the protagonist's last visit that he pays to his aunt as she lies dying. Present-day Palestine as a horror cabinet of a community decendet into farce. How else to portray the lived contradictions of the Palestinian people, the unbearable fate of the boy who grew up to be man through leaving behind what made him in order to break free.

As was the case for 'Divine Intervention', Elia Suleiman's former masterpiece, the viewer can't help but admire the originality of its style. What a wonderful thing that a Palestinian should be able to evoke the situation prevailing in his motherland and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not in a full-frontal, simplistic, dogmatic way (which would be forgivable given the circumstances) but in an unexpected, humorous, quirky, poetic fashion, a little as if Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati had decided to tackle geopolitics for once. Suleiman's talent is really offbeat : contemplation in preference to action (the narrator played by Suleiman himself observes more than he acts); silence rather than significant dialog (the main protagonists hardly ever speak and those who express themselves the most are secondary characters saying only superficial things); symbolism before realism (the Israeli taxi driver lost in the turmoil of a summer storm, not knowing where he is going, not recognizing his country anymore).

Occasionally very funny (the Iraqi soldier who can't find the battlefield; the gun of a tank following the coming and going of a young Palestinian in the process of taking out his trash bag and talking on his mobile phone without caring the least bit about the threat), 'The Time That remains' contains crazy gags which are a relevant reflection of the absurd atmosphere reigning in Palestine. But most of the time, the film consists in the poetic account of the odd life Palestinians are forced to live, concentrating mainly on the director's parents,a shy but loving mother and a fearless rebellious father, to whom the director pays homage. Not the type to wear his heart on his sleeve, Suleiman expresses his filial love with discretion and restraint. The scenes with his mother aged eighty and with his father dying in the car are particularly moving.

'The Time That Remains' looks like no other film of any sort. Go and see it.

A post-horrific movie. A half century plus of Israeli-Arab life as lived mainly in Nazareth. As depicted, the gradual erosion of Arab social life move the characters from inchoate normalcy to Beckettian realism. But since violence is muted virtually throughout the five to six decades shown, this viewer was left with a strange flatness of effect since Langdon and Tati-like staging dehumanized much of what I saw because of how the director composed the shots and how he directed the actors. Perhaps he was emotionally stunted by living through some of the history shown but his reaction.....his movie.....repelled me by his tiresome, repetitive remove from it all; he never showed the day-to-day-to-year-to-year horror of it all that made the absurdity understandable. There was no "middle" to the movie.

Another masterpiece by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, "The Time That Remains" chronicles Israel and Palestine's violent relationship. Deftly mixing drama, comedy, history and metaphysics, the film's first section watches as Arab resistance movements take up arms against the newly formed state of Israel. These movements slowly peter out, however, and pretty soon Suleiman's own family find themselves trapped within Israel, their new homeland. Here they eke out a living, and try to shrug off the literal and psychic violence directed at them from the Israeli majority.

The film's second half finds Suleiman returning to Israel from abroad. Part of the Palestinian diaspora, he's a man caught out of place and time, his identity seemingly stolen. We watch as Suleiman drifts in and out of spaces, never speaking, slowly confronting the fact that he will not witness Palestinian independence within his lifetime. Perpetually behind enemy lines, his body seems haunted by occupation forces. Ironically, even Jews no longer recognise "their Israel". "Where am I now?" an Israel taxi driver asks, when clouds of fog part to reveal a land whose borders always change.

Suleiman's films have always been attacked by Zionist groups. Such attacks epitomise Israel's own deep-rooted insecurity. She was "illegally" formed in the late 1940s, the result of rigged UN votes, a by-passing of the UN Security Council (who shot down Resolution 181 and the UNSCOP proposals), and the violent ejecting of some 750,000 Palestinians from their land before any lawful international consensus was reached. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of "Israel", the sheer speed, inhumanity and tactlessness at which she was created would lead to decades of conflict. Zionists, Arabs, the UN and Britain were complicit in this tactlessness.

While many Jews supported Israel's "re-formation", many prominent ones didn't. Albert Einstein would state that "the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state" and was deeply "afraid of the damage Judaism would sustain by this new nationalism". Lessing Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, would prophetically say in 1944: "The concept of a racial state – the Hitlerian concept - is repugnant to the civilised world. I urge that we do nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which might well have incalculable consequences."

Regardless, 55 percent of Palestine was, in an instant, taken by a Jewish population who had previously controlled 7 percent. The Palestinian majority, and their right to self determination, was swiftly ignored. Many massacres were committed in these early years (Deir Yassin etc), acts of ethnic cleansing which snowballed into the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which saw Israel capturing 78 percent of Palestinian land. Towns were obliterated and renamed, maps were redrawn and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees.

Next came the Sinai/Suez war (1956), when Israel, Britain and France set about bombing Egypt and invading the Sinai peninsula. After years of further squabbles, the Six Day War began in 1967 with Israel launching surprise air-raids on Egypt. Israel swiftly occupied the last remaining 22 percent of Palestinian land, as well as parts of Egypt and Syria (the Golan Heights, never returned). Of this attack, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would say: "The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove Egypt was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack them." Henceforth, Arab/Israeli relations only get worse.

The 1973 war followed, this time started by Egypt and Syria. Contrary to common portrayals, this war did not involve an attack on Israel, but saw Egyptian/Syrian forces confining their operations to sovereign Egyptian/Syrian lands that had been occupied by the IDF since 1967. As for Palestine, it would increasingly come to resemble a giant concentration camp, walls and checkpoints erected, its infrastructure annihilated and more of its land slowly confiscated. Meanwhile, roughly 8 million dollars a day would flow from the US to Israel, the tiny nation swiftly becoming a regional superpower.

Over the decades, numerous peace plans would be drawn up (most famously UN 242), most of which were rejected by Israel/the US for very specific reasons: the fear that a Palestinian majority will develop within Israel ("the demographic problem") and the fear that acquired land and settlements, all of which are deemed illegally acquired by the International Court of Justice, will have to be returned ("the withdrawal problem"). Since 1976, there has been overwhelming international consensus in support of a two state Israel/Palestine in keeping with internationally recognised borders, even though this grants Palestine far less land than it "deserves". The consensus includes Arab states and the Organisation of Islamic States. The US and Israel have blocked these proposals for almost 4 decades.

The Palestinian Liberation Organisation was formed in 1964. Since 1974 it has been recognised by the UN as the "government" of Palestine. Israel and the US categorise it a "terrorist organisation". The PLO would recognise Israel's right to exist in peace in 1993, accepting UN242 and rejecting all violence and terrorism. Also "representing" Palestine is Fatah, a major political party within the PLO, and Hamas, an ultra right-wing offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, at times backed by Britain/Mossad to essentially destroy the PLO and provide justification for Israeli counter-violence. Israel would also invade Lebanon several times (as well as mounting hundreds of illegal incursions), all in an attempt to expel the PLO from Lebanon, dethrone the Lebanese government and install pro-Christian leaders (Bachir Gemayel). The militant organisation, Hezbollah, was formed in response to these invasions. Israel would also back the South Lebanese Army and the Kataeb Party (the Lebanese Phalanges Party), violent right-wing sects. These groups used the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as cover for their slaughters of Palestinian refugees. The point? Talk, think and deliberate, before drawing lines on maps.

8.5/10 – Masterpiece.