Homage By Assassination

Elia spends a long night and day during the Gulf War waiting for news about his Palestinian family. He paces in his New York apartment, watches TV images, and scrolls through Arabic proverbs on his computer. In an ironic moment, he reads a letter from an Israeli friend who writes to him about her Jewish family in Iraq. A post-modern film diary which explores the complexity of Middle Eastern identity.

Filmmaker Elia Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960, well after the establishment in 1948 of the state of Israel in historic Palestine. After twelve years of self-imposed exile in New York, he returns to the land of his birth to find his roots. But his journey becomes a search for roots by a man whose culture has been uprooted. In a remarkable journey in search of what it means to be Palestinian, the images in Chronicle of a Disappearance are strung together like memories in an attempt to weave a whole out of elements that have been blasted apart. FESTIVALS & AWARDS 1996 Venice Film Festival, Luigi De Laurentiis Prize Winner, Best First Feature 1996 London Film Festival 1997 Sundance Film Festival 1997 New Directors New Films 1997 San Francisco Film Festival 1997 Seattle Film Festival 1997 San Francisco Arab Film Festival 1997 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival