Chronicle of a Disappearance 1996

Set in the fraught years after Rabin’s assassination and during the early days of Netanyahu’s term, the film travels between the West Bank and Israel through a mosaic of scenes that feel more like a documentary than a traditional plot. At the center is Ali Suliman as The Man, who returns from twelve years in New York City to a landscape that feels both intimate and alien, where life continues under the shadow of statelessness. The film refuses a single through-line, instead stacking impressions and conversations that accumulate without a neat conclusion, aiming to convey the uneasy texture of daily life in a politically charged moment.

Nazareth Personal Diary. In this warmer, more intimate section, the narrative drifts through family life and everyday rituals. The proprietor of a souvenir shop called “the Holyland”—a human, lightly comic figure who pours “holy water” from his own tap and can’t stop a cheap camel statuette from tipping over—offers a quiet, observational stage for the film’s mood. Jamel Daher brings to life the Holy Land owner, as E.S. and the shopkeeper sit together, waiting for tourists who rarely arrive, turning a storefront into a small, patient theater of daily life. A boat full of Arab men out at sea becomes a micro-drama as one man derides families that don’t share his background while another praises the families that do, illustrating how identity and belonging hover over ordinary conversations. In a separate moment, Suleiman interviews a Russian Orthodox cleric who laments the way tourism disturbs the Sea of Galilee, offering a critique that remains gently stubborn rather than overtly polemical.

A Short Middle Section. A brisk interlude shifts to a conference on Palestinian cinema where the film’s central figure steps up to speak. Here, the moment is almost comically thwarted by an immediate microphone feedback, and the orator leaves the podium, signaling the film’s recurring tension between intention and disruption.

Jerusalem Political Diary. This final stretch accelerates, blending absurd humor with a palpable sense of paranoia that pervades the wider society. What first appears to be a terrorist’s hand grenade is revealed to be a cigarette lighter, a twist that underscores the moment’s fraught misreadings. E.S.—who embodies the film’s questioning, observant presence—discovers an Israeli policeman’s walkie-talkie, and crosses paths with a lone young Arab woman in a fruitless search for an apartment that mirrors the men’s own searches for tourists. She speaks Hebrew fluently, yet is told by Jewish landlords that Arabs are not welcome, while Arab landlords urge her to stay at home to conform to Islamic tradition. The walkie-talkie becomes a tool for mischief as she uses it to broadcast pranks on the police, even singing a defiant, skewed version of Israel’s national anthem over the airwaves. The final stretch of the film follows her as she stages a guerrilla theatre piece in which the police unwittingly participate, a performance that blurs the line between performance and surveillance. The film closes on a quiet, almost intimate image: Suleiman’s parents asleep with all the lights off and Israeli material playing on their television, a requiem of stillness after a day of tension.

The work’s deliberate structure—two loosely connected diaries, a handful of micro-encounters, and a continual reframing of daily life under occupation—creates a continuous, unsettled mood. Throughout, the boundaries between documentary observation and personal fiction blur, inviting the viewer to reflect on belonging, memory, and the fragile humanity found within a landscape of division and endurance.