Striking visuals and witty irony frame a powerful
story about the survival of dignity and humanity

In The Time That Remains, Arab-Israeli director Elia Suleiman brings us a highly personal, episodic story about Arab life in Israel, based on his own experience and his parents' letters and diaries dating back to 1948. Most of the film was shot in and near his family home in Nazareth, in Israel proper, not occupied territory.

This film is important for historical reasons: beyond the often inflammatory sensationalism of video clips and sound bites, Americans receive little insight regarding life in recent decades, and now, for Arabs in Israel. In a series of vignettes, Suleiman unfolds his family history, starting with his father's resistance experience in the late forties, his own childhood in the seventies, young adulthood and departure from Israel in the eighties and present-tense return in middle age to reconcile with his dying mother. It is worth noting that the Suleiman family is Christian, a minority within a minority living in Israel.

The Time That Remains is cinematically intriguing as well, using skillful framing and a vignette format to combine deadpan comedy and melancholy resignation in a poignant exploration of the Palestinian identity. In personalizing the endless conflict, Suleiman melds his family history with elements of visual fantasy to display the foibles of Arab and Israeli coexistence — an approach that engages the audience without forcing judgment.
 
While some filmmakers might address the subject polemically, with an angry, in-your-face immediacy, Suleiman purposefully follows a different path, artfully conveying irony and absurdity in a manner thematically and visually reminiscent of Kafka, Keaton and Tati. His darkly funny imagery, minimalist approach and ability to consider the subject from a greater, less emotional distance, lend to a humanist aesthetic that succeeds where other attempts (ex: Julian Schnabel's Miral) have failed.
 

Senior Film Critic A. O. Smith, writing in the New York Times: "Mr. Suleiman, an Arab born in the Israeli city Nazareth in 1960 and currently living in Paris, has an exquisite eye for the conflicts and contradictions that bedevil his native city, but he examines them without polemics or sentimentality. "The Time That Remains has the scope of a historical epic with none of the expected heaviness. It presents a half-century of tragedy and turmoil as a series of mordant comic vignettes. Imagine a heroic poem boiled down to a flurry of witty epigrams, or a martial statue made of origami, and you will have some idea of the improbable way this filmmaker folds big themes into delicate forms. "Mr. Suleiman traffics neither in hatred nor in the romanticism of lost causes. Instead he finds comedy in cruelty, and also the reverse."      Read the complete review Film Critic Mark Keizer, writing in Box Office Magazine: "... a unique emotional entry point into the Palestinian dilemma, one that uses static shot composition and humor to clarify and comment, not to generate cheap laughs ...   The power of Suleiman's approach is its lack of political proselytizing or vengeful anti-Israeli point-scoring. ... [it's] the story of a boy (and, by extension, a people) sitting at the station for over half a century, waiting for a future that's stalled on the tracks."      Read the complete review