Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) directed by Elia Suleiman

 I never had been a big fan of the silent, physical comic movies growing-up. Though I knew of Chaplain, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jacques Tati but I didn't really watch them until I started watching and being interested in films as art. I first got wind of Elia Suleiman during the promotion of The Time That Remains (2009). I became interested in his other films and I managed to see first Divine Intervention (2002) and then TTtR. It took me awhile at the time, but I eventually got to see his first feature film and was amazed by it.

In each of the three films in Suleiman's "Palestinian" trilogy, we follow the silent Suleiman as he observes and interacts with life in apartheid and statelessness. The first and third movies are autobiographical treatments of Suleiman and his parents while the second is a then-contemporary allegory of life in the Holy Land during the Second Intifada. Chronicle of a Disappearance sees Suleiman as he comes back to the region after a 12 year exile in New York City. He examines life for Palestinians in Nazareth and Jerusalem. It is him trying to adjust to life and others are not allowed to adjust even to the apartheid system. The film style of Jacques Tati is very present and the satirical spirit of Tati is used as a framework to examine life for Palestinians in the years between the First and Second Intifadas when the idea of peace was at it's closes for Israelis and Palestinians before the door of peace slammed shut. We principally observes what Suleiman observes in the Palestinian peoples of Nazareth and Jerusalem and in himself.

The introduction of the Jerusalem section and the film's end are what really endears the film to me. When we go to the "Jerusalem Political Diary" we are treated to a lengthy phantom ride through East Jerusalem that ends in the most random way imaginable. At the movie's end we have a powerfully moving tribute to his parents and a rebuke of what the Israeli state as tried to do to them in one of the most controversial scenes in Middle Eastern Cinema (ironically controversial with other Arabs) that ends with the simple dedication: "To my mother and father, the last homeland."