Elia Suleiman may be one of Palestine's best-known directors, but he made a surprising admission to delegates at Doha's Qumra industry event this week: "I can't do plots," the Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention director confessed.
Suleiman's work is often characterised by montage and juxtaposition, and he went on to illustrate his point via the making of 1996's Chronicle of a Disappearance: "There was a script, but what there was not was a plot. For example, if I had three scenes that make a punchline, like say a car fight where two people get out of a car and they fight and then a couple more come in and they fight, then a third. Well, these were spread apart in the editing. In the script they were just put one after another, so I knew they were not supposed to be there exactly, but this was the kind of burlesque aspect I wanted to construct. This is what I did with quite a few scenes."
Suleiman added: “I was never really a cinephile [growing up]. When I said I wanted to make films it was really just as an excuse for why I hadn’t gone to university.”
Suleiman's cinema background may not be the most traditional, but it doesn't seem to have harmed his career. Chronicle of a Disappearance netted him the best debut feature film award at 1996's Venice Festival, while Divine Intervention won the 2002 Cannes Grand Jury Prize, the International Critics Prize and the Best Foreign Film Prize at the European Awards in Rome. His most recent film, The Time That Remains, won the Black Pearl prize for best Middle Eastern narrative film at the Middle Eastern Film Festival in Abu Dhabi in 2009. His short films have also won numerous awards.
Suleiman appeared at Qumra in his role as artistic advisor to the Doha Film Institute.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
