Critics reviews

This is a glimpse into the Palestine — and especially its beauty, its humanity — often raced past in Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian productions.

Suleiman derives more power from silence than screams... couching his resentments in unremarkable moments. There’s no speechifying, no harrowing depiction of the bitterness or cruelty still festering around the West Bank

An intriguing, highly sophisticated, and often very funny combination of fiction, documentary, diary, essay, and home movie. Armed with irony, absurdist humor, and a handsome visual style, Suleiman offers a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of middle-class Palestinian life in Israel and a complex understanding of Arab identity within that world.

The [film's] elements never seem to find their narrative next step. Instead, they accumulate and become the hues of the filmmaker's palette, hues that Suleiman uses to create a subjective summary of the unsettled quality of life in his homeland.

Suleiman’s images make circular patterns that mimic the Israel/Palestine impasse unmistakably. Inscribed in these patterns are tentative gestures of hope—in this context, even whimsy is a type of optimism. Chronicle of a Disappearance is a shrewdly soft-voiced argument for peace.

Clearly made and carefully structured, with numerous comic elements, the likable “Chronicle of a Disappearance” is an easy film to watch... [The film] piles up the contradictions while offering no simplistic answers for Palestinians living uneasily under the Israeli flag.