If Jacques Tati had made political films, they would have resembled this brilliantly absurdist yet deeply moving personal history of Palestine. Using frames within frames to emphasise the enclosure of the Occupied Territories within Israel, Elia Suleiman traces his family’s fortunes from his father’s attempted resistance in 1948 to his own exile’s return to face an unforgiving mother.
Drawing on his father’s diaries and completing the trilogy started with Chronicle Of A Disappearance (1996) and Divine Intervention (2002), this episodic memoir is packed with impeccably composed tableaux, running gags, sly and witty historical insights and moments of genuine poignancy that convey the growing sense of despair at enduring six decades of oppression in the picturesque town of Nazareth.