For a movie that opens with Santa Claus getting knifed, Divine Intervention has a surprisingly stoic side. Whether it’s watching an old man calmly stockpile bottles on the roof of his house, the better to throw them at the police when they come to get him, or a Palestinian woman destroy an Israeli checkpoint, seemingly with no more than the movement of her hips, the camera never blinks, and rarely moves, a sardonic witness to life in the Palestinian ghetto. When writer/director Elia Suleiman appears on screen (as a character identified in the credits only as "E.S."), he says not a word.

The same is hardly true of Suleiman himself; he speaks in heady sentences laden with academic terminology, eloquently laying out the basis for his unusual filmmaking style. Born in Nazareth, Suleiman has spent much of his life as an exile, living first in New York and now in Paris -- which, in some respects, puts him in an ideal position to examine Palestinian identity for a world audience. But Suleiman, like his movies, resists such easy classifications. "I make films in order not to be reduced," he says. "Just the contrary. When you are dealing with aesthetics, and especially in poetic language, the idea is to make an overture, not a closure."

Of course, any work dealing with Palestine -- especially one that ends with the cartoon massacre of a group of Israeli soldiers -- is bound to be evaluated primarily in political terms. But for Suleiman, the filmmaking process is intuitive, not dogmatic. "I'm completely the negation of intentions," he says. "If I start off with an intention, that means I've preconceived the limit of a frame. The minute I understand a sequence, I throw it [out]."

Instead, the film is built from a series of images, gathered from his notebooks, and built into sequences. "There is a moment I discover, not what the film is about, but where the film is heading, but I don't even have a preconception about that. I have a sense of what the film is going to be about, but I never know exactly where I'm going."

As a result of its piecemeal assemblage, Divine Intervention, subtitled A Chronicle of Love and Pain, plays out as a sort of black comic burlesque, a series of dark-humored skits. "The burlesque aspect is not really a strategy," Suleiman confesses. "It's really just someone with an intellectual baggage, who also likes to laugh at his own jokes."

The sequence that has drawn the most attention is the movie's finale, in which a target of a female Palestinian militant comes to life and slaughters the Israeli soldiers who've been shooting at her, defending herself with a shield in the shape of a unified Palestine and dispatching some soldiers with darts in the shape of the Islamic star and crescent. Despite the fact that the sequence is directed in what Suleiman calls a "Sergio Leone spaghetti Western-slash-ninja-slash Matrix" style, some viewers have read the sequence as a call to arms, or at least a vigilante daydream. Suleiman hesitates to explain the sequence, saying he wants to keep "the potentiality of reading" open, but he points out how the sequences that come before and after "castrate the potentiality of violence," positioning the ninja battle as the fantasy of a frustrated man who's just lost both his father and his lover, "a paralyzed, impotent man who's cutting onions in order to cry." That the sequence should be read straightforwardly rather than as an ironic exaggeration baffles him. "It's very strange how people, despite all the agony, after all this destruction, all this occupation, all this invasion, 60-something years of Palestinian diaspora and exile -- when you touch [on it] imaginatively, and in between brackets, in a cartoonish way, people go and say, 'It's a call for arms.' The arms are already called for, so long ago."

For Suleiman, the most wrenching scene in the film is of a far more mundane kind of attack: an Israeli checkpoint guard who humiliates Palestinians waiting to cross the border, yelling insults at them from close range with a megaphone. "To me, this is violence," Suleiman says. "The guy is sadistically exercising his daily habits. This guy is so near to reality, and he's like [a tiny] percentage of what really goes on at the checkpoint."

The difference in style between the two sequences is telling: The violence against Palestinians is depicted realistically, while the violence against Israelis is symbolic, imagined. Given the climate, though, it's not surprising that the latter has drawn the most attention -- even the sequence where a balloon emblazoned with Arafat's likeness drifts into Jerusalem and comes to rest on the Dome of the Rock seems to mask an underlying aggression. Suleiman calls himself a pacifist, but modifies the description: "an angry one, maybe sometimes." But, he argues, such anger has to be seen in context. "Here I am, this director who didn't really live occupation himself, with this kind of inner violence imagined. Instead of people telling me I was going too far, they should use me as a tool for analysis. Where does it come from? If they consider this violence, they should consider the question, why?"

Part of where it comes from is Nazareth. As depicted in the movie's first half, it's a pressure-cooker environment where violence -- inevitably, of the Arab-on-Arab variety -- can be unleashed with the slightest provocation; a soccer ball kicked onto an old man's roof is neatly cut in half before being returned. "In a ghetto, this is the kind of thing you see," Suleiman explains. "In a city where it's completely claustrophobic, and there's no space, there's no employment, people are paralyzed, people are despairing, they are living without hope. In the face of a dominant order that's so strong they cannot face [it], or think they cannot, they turn and they unleash their anger against each other." When he lived in New York, Suleiman would often go to Harlem since he lived nearby, and found the environment strikingly similar. "I found a sense of humor very similar," he recalls. "I kept telling my friends, I feel like I'm in Nazareth when I'm in Harlem."

For all the angry pacifism and rhetoric, though, the terms Suleiman uses to describe his films stem from a more primal vocabulary. He talks about "foreplay," and the sense of release that comes from laughter. "My best hope is that when people see the film, first of all, that they laugh," he says. "The questions come after. If you laugh, if you enjoy, you have a sense of sensual pleasure, then I think you should let that reside in you, and later on the understanding comes. I don't see the need for any sort of synchronization between understanding and having pleasure. When you fall in love, you might ask the questions, but you don't have all the answers."