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Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention is a mordantly amusing black comedy about life among the Arab citizens of Israel. The film makes excellent use of Suleiman's uniquely attenuated style of slapstick humor. It begins auspiciously, in Nazareth, where Santa Claus (George Ibrahim) is pursued by a gang of Palestinian kids. Chased up a hill, wheezing and dropping presents from his sack, Santa turns to face his attackers, revealing a butcher knife sticking out of his chest. With this darkly comic opening, Suleiman subverts a conventional cinematic narrative trope (his chase sequence is hilariously accomplished), and fulfills a personal revenge fantasy while delineating the vast chasm between the historical significance of Nazareth, the contemporary manifestation of its religious significance, and its current reality. Eschewing any sort of linear narrative, Suleiman goes on to illustrate his neighbors' tragicomic disregard for each other, in what can clearly be seen as metaphor for the current state of Arab-Israeli relations. His film also ventures into fantasy as the director himself appears, inadvertently blowing up an Israeli tank with a peach pit, using a helium balloon affixed with the image of Yasser Arafat to send an Israeli checkpoint into panic, and having precisely choreographed checkpoint trysts with a woman (Manal Khader) who turns out to be some kind of commando-slaying ninja assassin. Divine Intervention could be seen as a continuation of Suleiman's previous feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance, but the tone here is darker, inflected with mourning that is both personal (the death of the filmmaker's father) and political (the worsening of Mideast "tensions"). Divine Intervention makes few concessions to audience expectations, and some may be put off by the film's lugubrious pace, while others may be offended by Suleiman's symbolic violence. But the film remains an invaluably trenchant and timely look at the region it depicts.