Chronicle of a Disappearance
Suleiman plays himself returning to Israel and the West Bank after a long absence which is followed by a series of barely connected vignettes and sketches, which are intended to convey the feelings of restlessness and uncertainty from Palestinian statelessness.[6] The film is set in the tense period in the Israel-Palestinian peace process shortly after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, with the strained relations implied but not explicitly depicted.The gradual accumulation of images and dialogue start without conclusion presenting an unsettling kind of feeling, which was meant to convey the quality of life led by Palestinians given their statelessness.Some of the notable vignettes include the dull yet comedic routines of the proprietor of a souvenir shop called "the Holyland" in which he fills bottles of alleged holy water from his own tap and fails to keep a cheap camel statuette from falling over on his shelves.[8] Absurd humor is evoked alongside feelings of paranoia in the characters felt by the broader society; for example, what first appears to be a terrorist's hand grenade held by a Palestinian turns out to be a cigarette lighter.[4] Elia Suleiman was born in 1960 in Nazareth in extreme poverty; an interviewer later compared his background to the drawings by the late Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali.He left school at sixteen both out of his opposition to the "structured and confined" nature of his education as well as his difficult socio-economic conditions, and he immigrated to New York to live there for several years.She also stated, "[f]or every astute or revealing detail about a culture full of frustrations, there is liable to be a glimpse of someone falling asleep on a sofa or staring disconsolately into space.[10] All Movie Guide commented that "[i]n his fragmented, personal, self-critical, and low-key way, Suleiman makes his point that the disappearance he's chronicling is that of the identity of his people."[5] Sam Adams of The Philadelphia City Paper stated that the film "succeeds because of aesthetics, not politics' and avoids ideological commentary on the conflict.[8] Writing in Time Out New York, Andrew Johnston (critic) observed: "While Suleiman's debut initially seems to take the Seinfeld concept of being "about nothing" to new extremes, the ultramundane vignettes that make up Chronicle (voted Best First Feature at the '96 Venice Film Festival) ultimately advance an intriguing thesis, using humor rather than rhetoric to do so.