Director Elia Suleiman is best known for his absurdist comedies that capture the tedious, often surreal rhythms of life under Israeli occupation. Films like “Divine Intervention,” “Chronicle of a Disappearance” and “It Must Be Heaven” are unrelenting in their socioeconomic commentary on the constraints of Palestinian daily life, each marked by a precise and restrained visual language. Their humor often emerges from stillness and repetition, transforming moments of frustration and alienation into stylized acts of anti-colonial resistance that are as patient as they are subversive.
His 2009 film “The Time That Remains,” however, departs from the comedy he’s known for. Rather than filtering occupation through irony alone, Suleiman turns inward, using his aesthetic sensibilities to construct a deeply personal and intergenerational narrative. Tracing the lives of a Palestinian family across decades, the film anchors on the historical rupture of the Nakba — when Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 — and its enduring aftermath. Here, Suleiman’s minimalist visuals and deadpan humor take on a more mournful tone, with a wordless scene between Suleiman and his elderly mother watching battle on their TV screen proving particularly effective. These moments of silence and stillness carry the weight of loss, memory and transformation.
Like many others, the fictional family remains in its home after Israel’s establishment in 1948. We meet Fuad (Saleh Bakri), a resistance fighter who openly defies Zionist forces through a steadfast commitment to liberation. Yet, in a turn that reflects Suleiman’s characteristic tonal ambiguity, Fuad falls into the subdued rhythms of domestic life, becoming a normal family man under occupation.
Fuad’s son, ES — played by Zuhair Abu Hanna as a boy and by Suleiman himself as an adult — emerges as the film’s silent witness. With a still, observant presence, he registers the slow burn of resistance succumbing to routine: late-night fishing trips, minor neighborhood disputes and the unremarkable repetitions of daily life. This mundaneness becomes, in Suleiman’s framing, deeply political. Banality is not incidental but imposed, a condition of life shaped by constraint, where even the most ordinary actions carry the weight of a suppressed history.
Like directors Wes Anderson and Jacques Tati, Suleiman frequently inserts himself into his works. In his earlier films, Suleiman — playing himself, as usual — adopts a deadpan expression and remains largely silent. That restraint cultivates a quietly absurd humor that thrives on timing, framing and the tension between presence and withdrawal.
But in “The Time That Remains,” Suleiman challenges, if not outright dismantles, his previous frameworks. While his signature outlandish aesthetic remains intact, here it’s embedded with an affecting, melancholic undercurrent. His deadpan expression no longer serves as humor, with silence itself becoming a vehicle for estrangement. The film’s episodic structure, spanning generations, situates Suleiman’s persona within a broader narrative of Palestinian fragmentation. His style evolves from quirky minimalism into something far more politically and emotionally charged, reflecting what it means to exist without fully belonging.
Unlike Palestinian films like “All That’s Left of You,” which regularly resort to melodrama in order to garner sympathy from audiences, Suleiman’s magnum opus stands out as a controlled yet deeply stirring cinematic retelling of Palestinian history. “The Time That Remains” is an artistically brazen, slow and methodical film that cuts at the heart of what defines — and complicates — the lived circumstances of Palestinians across generations.
“The Time That Remains” can be streamed on Kanopy.
Off the Radar is a monthly column surveying overlooked films and shows available to students for free via NYU’s streaming partnerships.
Contact Yezen Saadah at [email protected].