The last of a loosely fashioned trilogy (Chronicle of a Disappearance, 1996; Divine Intervention, 2002) Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains is a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles a “present-absentee,” the term used by Israelis for Palestinians who were internally displaced during the war in 1948, and as such, lost the rights to their homes. Palestine is the connective tissue between the three films, as is the recurring character ES, played by the director himself, who silently navigates the landscapes of Israeli occupation; writing a screenplay in one, meeting a lover at a checkpoint in another, and returning home to Nazareth to his aging mother after a long, forced separation in the last.

The Time That Remains is a masterful consideration of the past through the present. It speaks volumes without much speech, giving space for visual discourse. Silence is not only the signature element of the recurring character ES, but also the film’s operating framework. The silences create opportunities for seeing, not necessarily in the manner of witnessing, but rather as comprehension; to see/comprehend the expanse of historical trauma stemming from the Nakba. Especially for Palestinians who stayed in what became Israel, the Nakba is not merely a past historical event embedded in their collective memory, but rather a continuous lived experience up until this day. But how to express that history when the historical trauma has not passed? This is the landscape of Suleiman’s imagination that intertwines generational pain with comedic antics to narrate the absurdity of being a Palestinian in Israel, and arising – in my mind at least – from the legacy of the Palestinian Emile Habibi’s novel The Pessoptimist, who in 1974 also used absurdity to narrate the ill-fated disappearance of Saeed and all Palestinians who became Israeli citizens.

The film takes us into this absurd world in a manner that is exquisitely and deliberately staged, choreographed, and symbolized, creating a highly aestheticized experience of this trauma from the very first frame. Set in narrative present time, the camera shot of the opening scene is from the perspective of a car trunk in which luggage is placed. On the wall behind the car are two touristic posters of bucolic fields and oranges, the Hebrew phrase “eretz acheret” (“another land”) printed on the bottom in Latin letters. Speaking Hebrew, the taxi driver calls his dispatcher to let him know he’ll be out of range, he’s headed somewhere he’s never been. A thunderstorm ensues, lightning and pounding rain derail the driver who is unnerved and asks ES sitting in the back seat if he knows the way, he’s lost. “Where am I?” he asks, while ES sits silently like a specter, “Where, where?”

With that, the film begins at the end of the 1948 war and the surrender of Nazareth to Haganah forces, moving across time to the early 2000s where Nazareth stands as a metonym of the Palestinian experience. Like many others, we see ES’s family flee their beautiful villa, planning to return when things calm down. Things never do. Haganah soldiers loot houses, performing a pas-de-deux as they fold up a delicate table cloth while listening to a Leila Murad record. ES’s father Fuad, a gunmaker and member of the resistance, never left, and the story transitions to a bright and orange-tiled apartment where ES, a boy of about 10 who is scolded at school more than once for calling America imperialist, and his mother and father now live. While it is between this apartment and a few other recurring locales that the majority of the film is staged, ES’s sojourn to the West Bank not only provides more comic relief by exaggerating the absurdity of life under military occupation (in one scene a tank rifle barrel closely follows a young man taking out the garbage while making plans on the phone for a dance party that night), but contrasts the mundane, repetitious, and limited experiences of those living in 1948 borders with the lively, rebellious, and expectant energy of Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority. Though materially threatened by the military occupation, West Bankers had (at that time) something to look forward to; a future Palestinian state. While Palestinians in Israel had learned Hebrew and become second class citizens of the new state.

The family’s neighbor in Nazareth fully embodies the madness of this state of being. An older gentleman who recently got a job at a gas station periodically douses himself with gasoline but fails to ever light the match, giving Fuad time to gently ease the ignitor out of his hands. (“What’s the point? Live or die it’s all the same,” he bemoans.) If he’s not doused in gasoline, he’s carrying a glass of arak espousing his expletive laden logic on the state of affairs. Comic relief, but lightness wrapped in black. Trapped in their own country, Palestinian Israelis, especially those that experienced the defeat first-hand, are stuck – leaving means fewer Palestinians, staying means fewer possibilities.

The film plays around with the existential tension between Israelis and Palestinians, one militarized and in charge, the other unsettled, to say the least, but grounded in their historical relationship to place. Far removed from the resistance of Fuad and his compatriots, the final scene acknowledges a possible contemporary rebellion: As ES sits in a hospital lobby, he observes a young Palestinian man dragging behind him the cop to whom he’s handcuffed as he greets three kuffiya-clad buddies sitting on a bench, while a remixed dance version of the BeeGees’ “Staying Alive” plays on the back track. The Israeli cop, like the taxi driver, is bound to Palestinians, but where they are headed, no one knows.

While the film ends on this contemporary mash-up, it is one of the final scenes with ES’s (older) mother that stays with me long after the credits pass. Thuraya, ES’s mother, sits on the balcony in three separate scenes. As a young Thuraya, she narrates the letter she is writing to Fuad’s sister in Amman. In the other two she is older, sitting silently and looking out blankly, the city of Nazareth splayed out in the background. ES observes her. In one, he brings out a speaker and she taps her foot along to the music. In both she holds something in her hands we come to understand later is a photo of Fuad, now dead for some years, sitting in the same spot looking thoughtful and resolute. Like ES, Thuraya does not speak. In her old age, she is looked after by a caretaker (seemingly from Southeast Asia) and takes refuge in TV, ice-cream cones (despite her diabetes), and the balcony. The final time she sits there, a fantastic celebratory fireworks display explodes over the city. Her face blank and unmoved, we observe her through ES’s eyes and feel the pain of history wrench through her. It’s a heartbreaking scene.

This is the magic of The Time That Remains – exploiting artifice and absurdity to acknowledge the continued trauma of the Nakba from the gunfire of the past to the fireworks of the present.