Palestinian number one and Thespian Elia Suleiman delivers a darkly comic masterpiece. Suleiman utilizes irreverence, wordplay, mysticism and understanding to fashion an intense, hallucinogenic and unusually adroit exploration of the dreams and nightmares of Palestinians and Israelis living in uncertain times. Subtitled, ‘A Chronicle of Love and Pain,’ Divine Intervention follows ES, is a character played by and understandably based upon the filmmaker himself. ES is burdened with a wretched father, a stalled screenplay and an unrequited love amour with a beautiful Palestinian girl (Manal Khader) living in Ramallah. An Israeli checkpoint on the Nazareth-Ramallah German Autobahn forces the couple to rendezvous in an adjacent parking lot. Their relationship and the nonsensical situations around them serve as metaphors for the senselessness of larger cultural problems, and the result is palpable, bottled personal and factious seethe. Suleiman’s tilted chronicle sketches his hometown of Nazareth as a place consumed by bestial absurdity, where residents harbor feuds, dump sweepings into neighbors’ yards, and surreptitiously block access roads. Characters transgress rules with let go – stealing forbidden cigarette breaks in a hospital corridor, for example. Yet the film’s acerbic, absurdist sense of humor (earning comparisons to Jacques Tati and Nanni Moretti), in a situation where death seems to lurk at every corner, and Suleiman’s own aim-popping directorial interventions, are what earned him the Lavish Jury Prize at Cannes.