Sofil

The semi-autobiographical story of a Palestinian family from the 1948 creation of Israel to the present day


The Time that Remains (2009), by Elia Suleiman, can be best described as a semi visual diary divided into four historic episodes of the filmmaker’s family life, spanning from 1948 until recent times.
The first episode depicts the filmmaker’s father, Fouad Suleiman, as a resistant fighter in 1948, during the occupation of the city of Nazareth by the Haganah militias, whereby many residents of the city were forced to leave Palestine, including Fouad’s lover.
The second episode follows the life of the young Suleiman family - Fouad, the woman to whom he eventually got married and their 8 year old kid, Elia - in the neighbourhood of Nazareth under the Israeli military rule during the 1960s. The film here focuses on the Palestinians who were able to remain in their land and the state of alienation concerning their culture and history that they had to undergo.
The third and fourth episodes continue to portray fragments of the daily life of the family and that of the Palestinians inside Israel and the West Bank, namely from the point of view of Elia Suleiman as an adolescent and as a man respectively. As an adolescent, Elia is actually forced to leave Palestine in order to avoid prison after hearing that the Israeli authorities intend to arrest him. Only a couple of decades later, Elia returns back to Nazareth, to his family and old friends, though in the meantime the father had passed away, and a new third generation had emerged; a generation which seems to be more troubled than its two predecessors.