Elia Suleiman

Elia Suleiman was born in 1960 in Nazareth

Elia Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960. His father was a lathe worker and his mother was a teacher. In his late teens he left for London and France, and later returned to his hometown.

Back home he became interested in cinema, read books and filmed with a home camera. From 1982 to 1993 he lived in New York. There he made Introduction to the End of an Argument and Homage by Assassination, which looked at how Arabs are shown in Western media.

In 1994 he moved to Jerusalem to teach film and media at Birzeit University, where he was asked to develop a film department. His first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance, won the Best First Film Prize in Venice in 1996. It was boycotted in the Arab world, and critics accused him of treason.

Divine Intervention won the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2002. The Time That Remains competed at Cannes in 2009, and It Must Be Heaven competed there in 2019. His films are known for silence and dark humor.

In 2008 he became a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. He is married to Lebanese singer and actress Yasmine Hamdan. In 2025 he said the war that began on October 7 made it hard for him to work on a new film.