'Palestinians' Assert Themselves Inside Israel
It is the last night of shooting for Elia Suleiman's feature film, "Chronicle of Love
and Pain." On a quiet street in Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem,
the 40-year-old director's special effects team is having trouble with a Molotov
cocktail that's supposed to be thrown in this scene. A group of gawking Palestinian
youths offers to help make a good firebomb. "They have experience with this kind
of thing," Suleiman says wryly. A 40-year-old from Nazareth, Israel's biggest
Arab town, Suleiman takes the gritty realities of life for Israel's 1 million Arab
citizens and examines the way identity is shaped for a people caught painfully in
the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "We are Palestinians-plus," he says.
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