Filmmaker Elia Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960. He moved to the US in the early 1980s and served as guest lecturer at several universities, art institutions and museums. In 1994, after twelve years of self-imposed exile in New York, he returns to Nazareth. His journey becomes a search for roots by a man whose culture has been uprooted. In Jerusalem, he was commissioned by the European Commission to initiate a Film and Media Department in Bir Zeit University. Director, producer, co-producer, screenwriter and actor, Elia Suleiman's cinematic style is often compared to that of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton, for its poetic interplay between "burlesque and sobriety".