Santa Claus is running for his dear life from a clan of young men in Nazareth. Wrapped gifts are falling off his straw-knitted backpack. He reaches the top of a hill, taking shelter in the ruins of a Franciscan chapel perched on the peak of Mount Precipice. As the clan encircles the heavily-bearded elderly man, a chef’s knife thrust in his chest is revealed.

An expressionless man is seen next taking his car for a ride. Along the way, he very calmly curses obscenities to his oblivious neighbors while cordially waving at them. “Fuck this morning,” he says, in a monotonic tone. “This one is a fucker. This one is a cuckold. This one is a son of a bitch. Fuck the father of your children. Fuck your mother.”

In 2002, the inguinal images of Elia Suleiman’s sophomore feature Divine Intervention came in with a jolt: angry, uncouth, unhinged, and unruly: images that upended representation of Palestinians on screen and challenged the archaic mores of Arab cinema. Today, this infamous introduction has become one of the most memorable openings in the region’s cinematic history, cementing Suleiman’s reputation as the most influential Arab filmmaker of the past 30 years.

The ubiquity of Divine Intervention may have led observers to forget how revolutionary the film has and continues to be. Made as a reaction to the Second Intifada, Suleiman swaps out the existential dread of his debut Chronicles of a Disappearance (1996) with palpable rage that permeates every frame of the picture. Chronicles made a big splash in Arab cinema with its deadpan humor, flipping the rules of classical narration on its head, and its atypical view of stagnant Palestinian lives stuck in an unchanging present, controlled by a normalized Israeli occupation of irretrievable homes. Divine Intervention amps up the tempo of its predecessor, expanding the Nazareth palette to encompass the equally confined reality of the West Bank and the more tangibly violent checkpoints.

Moments of everyday futility in Nazareth animate the first third of the picture: a passenger waiting in a station for a bus that never arrives; a man assembling glass bottles on the rooftop of his house to throw them at incoming police; two neighbors embarking on a lengthy match of throwing garbage into each other’s yards; and the foul-mouthed driver, who transpires to be Suleiman’s father, aimlessly smoking and drinking coffee every passing morning before he’s hospitalized.

Suleiman shifts focus to a burgeoning romance between his Nazareth-residing alter ego and an unnamed woman from the West Bank (journalist Manal Khader). Since neither can cross to the other side, their romance blooms at the checkpoint as they steal fleeting glances and touches under the nose of the IDF. The scant narration functions as pretext for a series of meticulously-choregraphed interconnected sequences – the majority of which are played out in Jacques Tati-like tableaus – impregnated with a disorienting mix of scorching frustration and fanciful fury.

A large portion of these surreal sequences are now deemed as some of the most iconic imagery in all of Arab cinema: a driving Suleiman finishes eating an apricot before throwing out its seed from his car window as it magically turns into a bomb that destroys an Israeli tank; the Palestinian woman nonchalantly crossing the checkpoints in a stylish dress and striking shades, causing the guard tower to suddenly crumble; Suleiman blowing up a pink air balloon carrying the face of Yasser Arafat that floats over the checkpoints and the heads of the nervous IDF soldiers before reaching Jerusalem and landing on Dome of the Rock; the Palestinian woman turning into a keffiyeh-cladded flying ninja who repels IDF bullets before using a combination of metal crescents and rocks to defeat the soldiers.

These images have become so iconically interwoven into the Palestinian visual narrative that it’s almost impossible to think about Palestinian film without them. Suleiman has always rejected the tone of victimization long associated with Palestinian stories. What he conjures up instead are little cosmoses where the Palestinian affliction doubles as a mirror for the grand human condition: of the numbing impact of power abuse; of the normalized and unexamined face of neo-colonialism; of the moral legitimacy of different forms of resistance.

Despite its Jury Prize win at the Cannes Film Festival, Divine Intervention faced a storm of criticism upon release, mostly by Israeli and Western commentators who objected to the scenes depicting the cartoonish attack on the IDF at the hands of the ninja-lady. The film was also shut out from the Best Foreign Language Oscar nominations as the Academy was yet to consider Palestine as an independent state.

Twenty-three years onward, Divine Intervention has lost none of its power, radicalism, and ingenuity. Its positioning of violence as a psychologically valid reaction to armed and physical oppression would not be accepted today. Unlike the early noughties, the post-October 7th ahistorical world is informed by a reductive black and white discourse that cannot accommodate Suleiman’s rebellious art whose politics defy simple categorizations.

Suleiman is now regarded as the grandmaster of Palestinian cinema, yet for the vast majority of his career, Western critics didn’t know what to do with him. The elusiveness of Suleiman’s intellectualism in the West is a reflection of their thorny relationship with the Palestinian cause, which has constantly veered from sympathy and compassion to hostility and suspicion.

The freedom afforded to Suleiman to evoke his Palestinian experience is no longer available to Palestinian filmmakers today, who are tasked with presenting streamlined narratives catered to the global masses. Suleiman’s self-reflexivity that is not devoid of self-criticism would now be deemed ill-fitting, as Palestinian cinema is forced, once again, to retransform into a tool of public awareness and resistance. The distorted discourse surrounding the Palestinian cause is not the sole manifestation of the occupation: it’s the cornering of thinkers and artists into occupying the tiresomely uniform role of the defender. Time and time again, Suleiman has rejected this stereotypical role, this occupation, delivering a work more injurious to the colonizers not solely for its moral conviction, but for its genuine artistry.

All four features Suleiman has directed in the past 30 years are pervaded by a sense of resignation: a resignation for an absurd occupation that doesn’t end; a resignation for the purgatory Palestinians have been banished in for 75 years. Divine Intervention is no different in that sense, but in the last haunting image – a pressure cooker steadily boiling – he impeccably captured the mood of a people who are simply fed up. Twenty-three years later, the kettle is still boiling.