The arrival of the first Palestinian film to obtain US distribution carries the inevitable connotations of a cultural embassy. Heedless of its historic responsibility, Divine Intervention sets out instead on a mission of subversion and accomplishes it with dazzling success.

If the brilliance of the film lies in the distance it takes up toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that’s not to say that director Elia Suleiman sees the conflict with impartial eyes. But the film refuses to be pinned down to the simplicity of a message like, " Because of the Israeli occupation, the everyday life of Palestinians is filled with humiliation and with a sometimes unbearable psychological tension. " For Suleiman, this doesn’t need to be proved. What he shows instead — with dry humor and great formal inventiveness — are the complex manifestations of this tension. He also shows the resistance (of which the humor and the inventiveness are themselves manifestations) of the Palestinian people, as represented by characters who are neither idealized nor sentimentalized.

Set in Nazareth, the first section of the film interweaves several series of vignettes, the main one involving a middle-aged welder whom we first see driving a car down a hill and waving at each pedestrian he passes while muttering obscene curses. We soon learn that the welder is in a financial crisis. He loses his house and property to repo men, and he’s shown repeatedly sitting alone at a kitchen table, sorting piles of mail (unpaid bills?). In the last of these shots, he rises, shifts his gaze slightly, and collapses, his pajamas making a swoosh sound that’s both naturalistic and splendidly cartoon-like.

The disconnection between scenes becomes a rich source of humor, as Divine Intervention meditates on the various ways a set-up and a payoff can miss each other. (Although the film’s mother lode of formalist gags has prompted comparisons with Keaton and Tati, its deadpan tragicomedy, its extended wordless passages, its reliance on long shots, its use of repetition, its meticulous interplay between on- and off-screen space, and to some extent the psychology of its characters all link it more closely to the work of Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang in What Time Is It There?) Suleiman’s Nazareth is a city divided into plots of land and private, elevated domains, from which people emerge to act out their aggressions (a road digger hurls empty bottles from his roof and spears a young athlete’s stray soccer ball with a kitchen knife; another man tosses bags of trash onto a neighbor’s ledge) or make futile attempts to go elsewhere (cars get stuck in the rubble of a vandalized ramp, blocked by neighbors’ cars, or repossessed by the authorities; a man waits daily at a bus stop only to be told that " there is no bus " ).

The second part of the film deals with the welder’s son (played by Suleiman himself, an icon of cool), his visits to his dying father, and his regular meetings with a woman friend at a parking lot near a checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. This second section is both stylistically freer than the first (it opens with a sensuous and expansive crane shot that recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend) and deeper in implied emotion. The distance of the camera becomes ambivalent, registering the effort of the filmmaker to avoid giving in to either sorrow or rage.

Palestinian resistance takes various forms in the film, some " real, " others " imaginary, " such as the funny and lyrical sequence in which a red balloon bearing the cartoon image of Yasir Arafat is released to float over Jerusalem, and especially an unexpected fantasy sequence that has drawn much criticism (less, it would seem, for its political content than for its stylistic aberration). But the most powerful forms of resistance are the act of witnessing (the hero and the heroine watching the arrogant, buffoonish antics of the checkpoint guards), the act of organizing (the grid of post-it notes on the hero’s wall — the elemental structural blocks, perhaps, of the script of the film we’re watching?), and the act of making connections (the implicit task of the whole film, with its emphasis on the disparity of scenes and the separation between places). In these acts, Divine Intervention finds its deepest strength and irony.

OF THE FIVE FILMS in the MFA’s Nicolas Philibert retrospective, which introduces the work of the French documentary-filmmaker to Boston audiences, I saw three. They’re three of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.

Philibert’s most recent effort, Être et avoir ( " To Be and To Have " ; 2002; May 1 at 6 p.m. and also May 2, 3, 4, 11, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, and 28 and June 1), epitomizes the strengths that appear to be constant in his work: respect and love for his subjects, formal openness, the ability to immerse the viewer in a world that has been forgotten (that of children, in Être et avoir) or that may be all but unknown (in his other films, the worlds of madness, of animals, of the deaf). Philibert sees these worlds as utopias, and he patiently maps their possibilities for pleasure and understanding. His camera is so unobtrusive that you hardly notice its unobtrusiveness.

A study of a semester at the primary school of a small French farming community, Être et avoir stimulates and enchants no less through its supple and elegant images than through its dense and poignant sounds. Philibert encourages you to remember the many sounds of school: voices, coughs, the rustling of clothes, the rubbing and scraping of pens on paper, laughter, whispering, a glass breaking, sleds hissing down a snowy hill — sounds that approach a hallucinatory intensity of too much happening at once. At this school, one calm and pleasant man teaches children of ages ranging from about five to about 10. His rather strict technique is both the result of long experience and an expression of love. In the end, Être et avoir is a love story, and a tragic one — not because the teacher’s love isn’t requited (for it is), but because it must end in separation. Philibert shapes the film around milestones and leavetakings: the teacher’s impending retirement, the older children’s imminent graduation to middle school.

La moindre des choses ( " Every Little Thing " ; 1996; May 8 at 6 p.m.), a portrait of the experimental psychiatric clinic La Borde, follows the rehearsals and concludes with the performance of Witold Gombrowicz’s play Operetta, in which the clinic’s patients play roles and provide the music. La moindre des choses is a film for which I was entirely unprepared and which I can best describe by all the things it doesn’t do. There’s no exploitation, no " effects, " no slotting of the characters into some discourse " about " madness and therapy (similarly, Être et avoir isn’t a documentary " about " education). The film is an act of absolute respect, without any of the condescension that the word can imply, and without a hint of self-congratulation. You’re not permitted to be surprised by the humanity of the patients (why would that surprise you?) or by the exceptional talents that several of them display. What might surprise you most, apart from the incredible beauty of the film, is your own capacity of feeling close to these people, moved by their isolation, happy for their triumphs. There’s no difference between the way Philibert films sick people and the way he films normal people. But he’s not making a facile point like, " Look, there really is no difference " (because there is); rather, the film leads you to a heightened state of perception where the differences between people no longer serve as a ground for exclusion.

Le pays des sourds ( " In the Land of the Deaf " ; 1992; May 10 at 11:45 a.m.) is a study of people, of different ages, who were either born deaf or who became deaf before they acquired language. I was in tears throughout almost the whole of the film, not because it asked me to feel sorry for these people but because it presented a world that was both entirely unknown to me and that I recognized, with a shock that remained active throughout the movie’s 99 minutes, as familiar. It’s impossible, I think, for any viewer not to identify with these people, for whom the need to communicate is so intense. There’s nothing schematic in the way Philibert sees them. He portrays them neither as the bearers of a tragic destiny nor as figures in whom a universal alienation finds privileged expression. He simply shows what an overwhelming experience it is to communicate. To see the incredible scene in which two groups of deaf people hug each other goodbye at Orly Airport is to believe again that there is a good reason for the cinema to exist.

This Wednesday, April 30, at 6:30 p.m., the French Library will host a free presentation of the work of Nicolas Philibert, with clips from his films. A reception will follow. The French Library is at 53 Marlborough Street; call (617) 912-0400.