In the worst inner cities in America, there is an undertow of anger and resentment that is the equivalent of hundreds of tornados. Since this energy cannot be stifled or contained, it oftentimes explodes within families and spreads out into the neighborhood. People get into fights or feuds. There are drive-by shootings. The already torn and tattered threads holding these communities together are completely shredded.

This process is the subject of Divine Intervention. Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman has made a highly imaginative film about what has happened to his hometown of Nazareth under the Israeli occupation. Instead of hammering home his rage at the plight of his people, he has chosen to depict the destruction of community, the loss of civility, and the denial of human rights through a stylized series of vignettes ranging from small moments of realism to full-blown fantasy. At the heart of this creative and heart-affecting enterprise is his contention that oftentimes his neighbors in Nazareth have no other place to vent their anger and frustration than upon each other. It is a situation very analogous to what has happened in America's inner cities.

The strange mood for the entire film is set in the opening scene where a man dressed in a Santa Claus outfit is chased up a rocky hill by some youths as gifts fall out of the pouch he is carrying on his back. There is no peace on earth or good will for these people. In the next scene, an elderly man driving a car waves politely at all the people he knows on the street while cursing and ridiculing each of them under his breath. An angry man has stacked bottles on his roof and when the police come to fetch him, he throws them down on them. A neighbor defiantly tosses his garbage bags into the garden of the woman who lives next door. Everywhere in the city, anger rears its ugly head.

E.S (played by the director) visits his father (Nayef Fahoum Daher) who is in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. In his spare time, he meets his girlfriend (Manal Khader) at a parking lot near an Israeli checkpoint. They sit in his car in silence holding hands and watch the unfolding of events in front of them as Palestinians are treated like dirt and humiliated by the soldiers in charge.

Then E.S. comes up with a clever idea. He blows up a red balloon with Yasser Arafat's smiling face on it and releases it up into the air. It floats over the city and lands on the top of the sacred Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. In another scene, E.S. blares Arab music from his car at a stop sign and stares at an Israeli in the car next to him. The encounter speaks volumes although there are no words spoken by either man.

The two most cathartic vignettes are the most far-fetched. In the first, E.S. finishes off a peach while driving down the highway; when he throws the pit out the window, an Israeli tank is blown to smithereens. In the second, his girlfriend becomes a resourceful ninja who takes on and defeats a group of Israeli commandos who are using cardboard Muslim women for target practice. Suleiman's Divine Intervention uses gags, imagination, and playfulness to defuse the toxins of anger, resentment, and hate that have taken over in Nazareth under the Israeli occupation.


Screened at the 40th New York Film Festival, October 2001