Four episodes that tell the story in silence the family of the Palestinian director Elia Suleiman and a people without a land, from 1948 (when Israel was founded) to today.
flow of thoughts, weather mixed with Proust, the Swabian, there is no chronological order, nor a call between an analog and the other episode. Dry geometric shots, but ordered (much like Lourdes Jessica Hausner if you have seen). And even here, as in Lourdes, there is ample room to irony, though slightly bitter: in front of a house is a huge tank, a guy goes out to empty the garbage, and the gun follows him few inches in its minimum shifts, but the guy even realizes it, and also maintains a mobile phone conversations. I ran a smile: the emblem of a people who live with the horror, so that it becomes her routine. It moved me even more the scene of the fireworks: the mother of the protagonist is on the veranda, but not watching them, even turns his attention just on the other side, sitting in the same place where her husband, dead for years , sat down and moving even further later in the hospital, where she constantly keeps her picture in hand: there is nothing to rejoice, to which colors look back. Beautiful scene!
The rest is all a dream and surrealism (which I like so much): director pole vault the wall of Gaza, for a cinema "Real" than ever, where the images are only to communicate more of the very few and scanty dialogues in the script, just because real completely devoid of special effects, where there is the anxiety of gesture and speech, will made a stunning and sensational, the limit of most viewed films on the big screen.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been rebuilt thanks to the diaries of his father Fuad, who joined the Palestinian resistance, and correspondence of the mother substrate from which the film comes to life, with Elia Suleiman at the scene, self-interpreting as an adult. A film about the war, but not obvious, but it suggests only the idea, there whispers the plan to the ear, in a hushed, unreal. The soldiers are a sort of puppet movements stiff and mechanical, they move to march, and are rather dull: the night watchman every night and ask his friend Fuad engaged in fishing who they are, what they do and where they come from, unable to realize that it is always the same people. This sort of caricature is paid to the Israeli Arabs or Palestinians remained in their homeland and deprived of their nationality: the neighbor who every other day threatening to set themselves on fire with kerosene, Aunt Olga, who says he saw on TV next to important political figures his relatives, the parents of the usual prey of the usual phrases and gestures: the mother washes the dishes mechanically and his father after dinner watching TV, Elia was a child is totally off, always walks with his head down, not talking, always has the same look stupid and throw the lentils in the garbage of her aunt, then moved the dish to her mother who promptly the lava. Estrangement, alienation, the Palestinians deprived of their individuality, personality, their emotions, without a soul. This is made from beautifully flawless shots: the protagonists are often left out of the frame, there were almost as if the human was not the protagonist of the story, but only an outline: Fuad when watering his plants in the garden, are them the main characters, the only ones to have kept some fancies existential. In the field of view only the objects, food, nature, plaisir de vivre that no longer belongs to the family of Elijah.
With a claustrophobic journey by taxi will arrive in the Holy Land Nazareth, you can find a manufacturer of arms, the father of Elijah, the face of dignity, resistance to the Zionist, the back straight that you do not bend even with the beating , and the trip coninuerà through his alter ego, Elijah himself, through his childhood, adolescence and then return home with a sense of loss, disbelief, and resignation before an impassable wall. But do not forget: you have an auction to jump, you just take a run and stand out the flight!
