In the context of its major new exhibition Chronicles of a Disappearance, bringing together the work of Omer Fast, Teresa Margolles, Philippe Parreno, Taryn Simon and José Toirac, DHC/ART Foundation is delighted to present two films by acclaimed Palestinian director Elia Suleiman.

FREE ADMISSION
Seating is limited and available on a first come, first serve basis.

The Time that Remains 2009
(Le temps qui’il reste)
Tuesday, February 7th at 7 PM
Original version with French Sub-Titles

Chronicle of a Disappearance 1996
(Chronique d’une disparition)
Wednesday, February 8th at 7 PM
Original version with French Sub-Titles
Followed by Q and A with Elia Suleiman

Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium
Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion
Musée des Beaux arts de Montréal
1379 Sherbrooke Street West

Elia Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960 and co-directed his first videos with Jayce Salloum in New York where he lived between 1982 and 1993. His first theatrical feature Chronicle of a Disappearance chronicles his return to Israel and the West Bank after this long exile in New York. It was made while he was teaching at Birzeit University near Ramallah. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is central in Suleiman’s autobiographical films, which re-imagine and “perform” the issues and conflicts of his land and its people with a wry, almost silent humour and a burlesque sobriety reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. He has won numerous awards, including the grand Jury prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival for his second feature Divine Intervention: a Chronicle of Love and Pain (2002), and the Best First Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1996 for Chronicle of a Disappearance.

The Time that Remains (2009) “is a semi-autobiographical film in four episodes about a family, my family, from 1948 until recent times. The film is inspired by my father’s private diaries, starting from when he was a resistance fighter in 1948, and by my mother’s letters to family members who were forced to leave the country. Combined with my intimate memories of them and with them, the film attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained and were labeled "Israeli-Arabs", living as a minority in their own homeland” Elia Suleiman

Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) is an extended meditation on the life of contemporary Palestinians in the “Holy Land”. The film is told in a series of witty and gracefully restrained vignettes divided in two parts which echo the film’s formal ambitions: Nazareth: A Personal Diary and Jerusalem: A Political Diary. Using a wide spectrum of impressions to chart a disappearance of the self within a disappearance of the state, the film uses repetition and fragmentation as a poetic device asking audiences to decipher its multiplicity of meanings and textures.

Information: info@dhc-art.org