Palestinian comic visionary Elia Suleiman is at the height of his powers with this series of deadpan, interconnected, absurdist vignettes about Palestinian life on either side of an Israeli military checkpoint. Mutely following the travails of two lovers — one who lives in Nazareth, the other in Ramallah — as they navigate the wall between them, Divine Intervention is surreal, satirical, and biting in its political criticism without ever surrendering its poetry. It’s both sad in its vision of the world but also deeply warm in its humour.
Elia Suleiman is the greatest-living filmmaker to carry the mantle of Jacques Tati. All but forgotten from the mainstream filmgoing consciousness, Tati’s innovations with form and tone have been repurposed by filmmakers as varied as Roy Andersson, Aki Kaurismäki, Ulrich Seidl, and, perhaps most of all, Wes Anderson. But Suleiman’s method of feeding the Tati-esque through the prism of Palestinian experience creates something completely new that walks an astonishing poetic line between melancholy and absurdity. And WOW what an amazing soundtrack!
Community Partner
Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader, Nayef Fahoum Daher
France/Palestine
2002
In English, Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Producer
Humbert Balsan
Screenwriter
Elia Suleiman
Cinematography
Marc-André Batigne
Editor
Véronique Lange
Elia Suleiman
Elia Suleiman is a Palestinian filmmaker born 1960 in Nazareth. He moved to New York in 1981, where he frequently served as a guest lecturer at universities, art institutions, and museums. He has received grants from ITVS and the Ford Foundation, and was the recipient of the Rockefeller Award for work achievement. In 1994, he moved to Jerusalem, where the European Commission asked him to initiate a Film and Media department at Bir Zeit University. His first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), won the Best First Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Filmography: Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996); The Time That Remains (2009); It Must Be Heaven (2019)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
All the Lovers in the Night
A lonely proofreader's isolated world begins to open through an unlikely friendship with a gentle physics teacher. Based on Mieko Kawakami's acclaimed novel, this luminous drama is a delicate meditation on loneliness, intimacy, and self-discovery.
Clarissa
Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa brings Mrs. Dalloway to present-day Lagos, with Sophie Okonedo playing the titular society hostess opposite David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri, and India Amarteifio in a Nigerian vision of class, privilege, and past lives.
Image: © Courtesy of Elevation Pictures
Opening Gala: The Debut
VIFF is honoured to open the festival with this special by-invitation screening of Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut. When meek Mona (Julianne Moore) lands a part in a musical, she fully inhabits her character, but grows increasingly untethered from reality.
Árru
Set against the mountains and fjords of northern Norway, Árru follows reindeer herder Maia as a proposed copper mine threatens her Sámi community, forcing her to fight to protect both her community and the land that sustains it.
The Beloved
When Esteban Martínez, an acclaimed director with violent tendences, invites his estranged daughter to star in his latest project, the stage is set for a familial reconnection. But as tensions flare, questions about his intentions rise to the surface.
MODES 1
Archive and the land reveal other ways of seeing, ensuring that what is meant to endure cannot be erased.