DIVINE INTERVENTION

The most memorable opening of any CIFF feature this year shows Santa Claus being pursued through modern-day Nazareth by an irate gang of Arab youth. It's one of a series of largely dialogue-free, deadpan vignettes that comprise DIVINE INTERVENTION. Like “The Matrix” (and you will soon understand and appreciate the comparison), DIVINE INTERVENTION cannot be simply described, it must be experienced, as Elia Suleiman's surreal lens depicts the oddities and transcendent fantasies of a defiant people living under the boot-heel of occupation. First we see a series of petty feuds and backbiting among the stifled villagers. One elder tries to break the chain of antagonism, only to fall ill. His son is a man named E.S. (director Suleiman), in love with a Ramallah woman. But the couple is cruelly barred from crossing over to each other by an Israeli military checkpoint; they can only share sessions of chaste hand-holding in a car in a dirt lot in no-mans-land, a few hundred yards from the bullying soldiers. Out of their frustration arises a miracle and then an astounding vision materializing the hopes and anger of a trampled society. In real life the actor-writer-director attributes his own father's death to the after-effect of tortures inflicted by Israeli troops. Here he strikes back eloquently, destroying tanks onscreen the way no one can in reality, and targeting his foe with an arsenal of digital effects, as direct and true as rocks hurled during the Intafada. (In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles)