Chronicle of a Disappearance

Director: Elia Suleiman

1996 / 88min / DCP

Returning to the West Bank after a lengthy hiatus in New York in the early 1990s, Palestinian filmmaker Suleiman, looking at his countrymen with fresh eyes, created a film—in which Suleiman plays the role of inquiring protagonist—that asks: to what degree have the Arab population of Israel retained or lost a distinct national identity. Described by its director as “a journey in search of what it means to be Palestinian,” Chronicle of a Disappearance merges documentary and narrative film techniques to depict a society teetering between middle-class self-satisfaction and an uneasy awareness that danger lurks everywhere, all the more palpable as his film was shot in the period following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu. “Reminds us that there is a secular life that transpires outside feverish cryptoreligious conflicts, and from the film’s point of view, these conflicts are extraneous to the simple facts of existence… Worldly and skeptical… A shrewdly soft-voiced argument for peace.” —Gary Indiana, Artforum