Rehmat's World
May 6, 2010 ·
‘The Time That Remains’ is sort of an autobiographic narration of its director and screenplayer, Elia Suleiman, who last produced ‘Divine Intervention’ (see videoa below) in 2003. The movie is based on four historic episodes, about Suleiman’s family – spanning from 1948, until recent times. Film’s screenplay was inspired by Suleiman’s father’s diaries of his personal accounts of being a resistance fighter in 1948 and his mother’s letters to his family members who were force by the armed European Jew terrorist groups to leave Palestine since then. Combined with his own memories, the film depicts the horrible experiences of the Native Muslim and Christian Palestinians who refused to leave the Occupied Palestine called ‘Israel’.
The film is produced both in Arabic and Hebrew and its cast includes Saleh Bakri (as Fuad), Yasmine Haj (as Nadia), Leila Muammar (as Thuraya) and Elia Suleiman (as Elia). The film was screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2009 Festival de Cannes – and the 2010 London Palestine Film Festival.
Gilad Atzmon wrote an interesting review of the movie, titled Not Much Time Remains For Israel, in which he writes: “It’s obvious that Israelis have never managed to make the holy land into their ‘homeland’.
They’re alienated from its nature, they poisoned the soil and polluted their rivers, they ruined the landscape shredding it with gigantic concrete walls and monstrous urban settlements but worse than that they eradicated the indigenous civilization of Palestine or at leat this is what they tried to do. In fact this unique form of Israeli detachment is where Suleiman launches his film.
With Suleiman himself seated silently in the back of a brand new limo we watch an Israeli chauffeur prepare himself a journey. Using his radio communication system the driver reports to his station “do not try to contact me, I am about to start a long ride…” Within a few seconds into the journey a storm breaks out, lightning, thunder and rain is pouring. Our Israeli chauffeur is totally disoriented, he cannot see, he doesn’t know where he is, the fuel is running out. It is not long before he stops his car just to find out that the radio is dead. “What am I doing here? Where am I? How I get here in the first place?” He cries out. The Israeli driver is stranded in the middle of night out of nowhere. He is isolated with no radio or fuel in an unknown land that was supposed to be his promised one. He is lonely but not alone. He has a silent Palestinian passenger sitting comfortably in the back seat staring at him.
The film is produced both in Arabic and Hebrew and its cast includes Saleh Bakri (as Fuad), Yasmine Haj (as Nadia), Leila Muammar (as Thuraya) and Elia Suleiman (as Elia). The film was screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2009 Festival de Cannes – and the 2010 London Palestine Film Festival.
They’re alienated from its nature, they poisoned the soil and polluted their rivers, they ruined the landscape shredding it with gigantic concrete walls and monstrous urban settlements but worse than that they eradicated the indigenous civilization of Palestine or at leat this is what they tried to do. In fact this unique form of Israeli detachment is where Suleiman launches his film.
With Suleiman himself seated silently in the back of a brand new limo we watch an Israeli chauffeur prepare himself a journey. Using his radio communication system the driver reports to his station “do not try to contact me, I am about to start a long ride…” Within a few seconds into the journey a storm breaks out, lightning, thunder and rain is pouring. Our Israeli chauffeur is totally disoriented, he cannot see, he doesn’t know where he is, the fuel is running out. It is not long before he stops his car just to find out that the radio is dead. “What am I doing here? Where am I? How I get here in the first place?” He cries out. The Israeli driver is stranded in the middle of night out of nowhere. He is isolated with no radio or fuel in an unknown land that was supposed to be his promised one. He is lonely but not alone. He has a silent Palestinian passenger sitting comfortably in the back seat staring at him.
Uprooted Palestinian
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