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 Imil 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….READ MORE — ALEXA FIRAT