The first third of 'Divine Intervention' is a portrait of a crowded community in Nazareth: neighbours feud bitterly over property boundaries and parking spaces; and a young man waits all day at a bus-stop even though he knows the buses are no longer running. All these are thinly veiled allegories of Palestinian life under the Israeli Occupation, where territory and borders are an unending point of contention, and where ordinary services are suspended indefinitely. Interwoven through these dry, often bizarre episodes is a simple narrative in which an angry man sees his workshop forced out of business by the restrictions of Occupation, and then, after all his assets have been seized, suffers a heart attack and collapses.

The protagonist of 'Divine Intervention' is filmmaker E.S., played by alter ego Elia Suleiman, who also wrote and directed the film - and the man who has collapsed is his father. We first encounter E.S. eating an apricot as he drives to visit his father in hospital - as E.S. winds down his window and throws out the fruit's stone, it hits an Israeli tank, which promptly explodes. This, like so many scenes in the film, is a 'divine intervention' - a fantasy of resistance, defiance and escape inserted by the director into his autobiography, in a wishful, but ultimately futile, attempt to reverse the daily injustices of Occupation through his creative art.

'Divine Intervention' is a surreal, very dark farce almost entirely devoid of dialogue - much like the status of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Elia Suleiman's gentle visual satire and minute social observations are reminiscent of the films of Jacques Tati ('Monsieur Hulot's Holiday') or Otar Iosseliani ('Monday Morning'), but the political nature of his work makes it more important, and much more bitter.

Suleiman is also a fine actor, who somehow manages to convey an extraordinary range of emotions despite maintaining a fixed expression of quiet impassivity throughout. In particular in the sequences where E.S. sits silently in the car park of the Al-Ram Checkpoint and holds hands with his Jerusalem girlfriend (Manal Khader) as they both stare stonily ahead at Israeli guards humiliating Palestinian drivers, his righteous indignation and erotic longing combine to create a uniquely nuanced intensity.

A film full of surprises, epiphanies and magic, set in a world where change is possible only in one's dreams, and where a director can prevent his father's miserable death only in his film. One of this year's must-sees.

Anton Bitel, 30.03.03