“A neutralised angel, in my case, wingless,” Elia Suleiman says of the fictionalised self who appears throughout his oeuvre, likening his double to the dispirited angels observing post-war Berlin in Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987).1 In his first feature, Segell ikhtifa (Chronicle of a Disappearance, 1996), the then 37-year-old expat returns from New York to Nazareth, where he witnesses the clumsy mechanics of Israel’s occupational regime close-up: hungry c...
