catapult magazine

I am going to see Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain at the Musicbox Theatre (http://www.musicboxtheatre.com) tomorrow night… or I guess that would be tonight now.

Yeah, so it’s by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman and it won Best Foreign Film at the 2002 European Film Awards, Jury Prize at both the Chicago International Film Festival and the Cannes International Film Festival. It looks like a great and hysterical look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has been compared to “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

I’ll check back after I’ve seen it.

If you want to check it out go to Avatar Films @ http://www.avatarfilms.com

I saw this film when it came through DC. I definitely wouldn’t classify it as hysterical, but it does have some funny moments (of things that happen in people’s imaginations but play out on screen—and the introduction was so bizarre and funny and unexplained). We left (in the words of a friend of mine) “not knowing what we had just seen, but knowing we liked it.”

Luckily one of the friends who was with us had lived in Palestine for three years and could help us with whispers to tell us who was Israeli/Palestinian, who was speaking Hebrew/Arabic, who was a sympathizer, etc.

What did you think of it?

So I saw it last Thursday night and I thought it was a good look into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like Larynsaid, "I definitely wouldn’t classify it as hysterical, but it does have some funny moments… We left (in the words of a friend of mine) “not knowing what we had just seen, but knowing we liked it.”

My thoughts exactly. We came in and laughed and pondered, but most of the movie we were just taking it all in. One thing we noted, as in many foreign films, Divine Intervention didn’t rely on dialog that much but relied much more on implied gestures and an overall experience.

My friends and I decided that the movie itself was good but the conversations after the movie trying to figure out what we had just seen were better. We loved speculating on scenes like the “red balloon” scene.

We didn’t have anybody to help us figure out who the Palestinians and Israelis were but we did have a lot of fun guessing.