Director in Person (Segell Ikhtifa). The acclaimed first feature by Elia Suleiman, whose documentary films and collaborations with Jayce Salloum have shown at PFA. Born in Nazareth, Suleiman lived in New York from 1982 to 1993. Returning to Israel, in this film he "uses his privileged position of insider/outsider to take a witty and ironic, yet heartfelt, look at how Israel's Arab population has lost its national identity°.Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, the theater of repressed violence and the gentle comedy of everyday life, Chronicle of a Disappearance is much more complex than it at first appears." (Deborah Young, Variety) Suleiman's characters (and he is one of them), improvising on their own lives, move through what he calls a "comedy of errors." Eccentric exemplars of the Arab middle class, they, in the director's words, "wander/wonder through this circular labyrinth in an attempt to break free from their ghettoized existence"-first in Nazareth, where nothing happens, nothing moves, then in Jerusalem, where everything moves, and still nothing happens. Playing the humor of life on the edge, Suleiman offers "a compilation of possible truths."