The award-winning director lives in Paris, but comes back regularly to visit his family in Nazareth and to make movies here – though it’s not due to any love for the land of his birth. In a rare interview with an Israeli journalist, ‘the Palestinian Chaplin’ reflects on his career
Nirit AndermanFeb 27, 2023
REYKJAVIK – The best moment in Elia Suleiman’s life was the day he left Israel. There is no hesitation when the Palestinian filmmaker says this. From his perspective, it is an obvious truth unburdened by any semblance of doubt.
That happened some 25 years ago. At the time, he had been living in Jerusalem while teaching film at Birzeit University in the West Bank. He had already completed his first film, “Chronicle of a Disappearance,” which premiered at the 1996 Venice Film Festival. Critics heaped praise on it and the jury gave him the best debut feature prize. Overnight, Suleiman was a rising star in world cinema and soon after was offered residency in Paris. He did not think twice.
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“It’s not like I decided to leave Israel; I have left Israel since I was born. It doesn’t exist in my dictionary to consider staying in a country I don’t belong to,” he tells Haaretz, in an interview conducted in English on the sidelines of the European Film Awards in the Icelandic capital.
“I mean, the only people I know who stay [do so] because they have no other option. I have the privilege of traveling. I don’t cater to Israel at all. It’s not an enemy country – it’s an enemy place. I have to cut through it like in a Western. I have to do my stopovers there, I have to visit my family. So I have to cross this war zone from the airport. I can’t even relate to it. It’s just filled with hatred and anger.”
Warming to his theme, he adds: “I never thought for one second in my life I would actually be living in a place like that. I mean, the only attachment I had to it was my family in Nazareth.”
Nevertheless, Suleiman keeps returning to the land of his birth. And, contrary to his statements, the world’s best-known Palestinian filmmaker does so not only to visit family but also to shoot movies.
He has directed four films to date and all of them were shot – wholly or in part – in Israel, mainly in Nazareth. Hatred, love, family, aromas, flavors, culture, childhood memories: all keep him coming back, in order to do exactly what he does best. He is glad he left Israel, yet his inner cowboy cannot stop coming back.
“Actually, my relationship to Israel is the reason why I make these films there – but not in a positive sense,” he explains. “I don’t think it would be fair to my ethics to use a tender word for this country. It’s impossible. It used to be just rhetoric for how to describe the place, but now it’s on our skin. It’s engraved.”
The quiet observer
Suleiman, 62, arrives for the interview wearing a broad-brimmed hat. Despite the Western vibe it gives off, it is not in fact a cowboy hat, but something reminiscent of the straw hat worn by the character he plays in his most recent film, 2019’s “It Must Be Heaven.”
We meet on a Saturday morning in the lobby of the hotel where he is staying, hours before the ceremony where he is set to receive the European Film Awards’ achievement in world cinema. Of course, in a Reykjavik winter, “morning” is a subjective term. At 10 A.M., the streets are still dark and dawn is still yet to arrive. The hat is placed gently and respectfully on a nearby armchair.
When I asked to interview Suleiman, I was unsure if he would agree. Over the years, he has repeatedly refused to be interviewed by the Israeli media. I did find one interview in the archive that he granted to the late Haaretz film critic Uri Klein at 2009’s Cannes Film Festival, but that was it. Another Israeli journalist who asked to interview Suleiman in Reykjavik was rebuffed.
“Haaretz is the only paper I still did not boycott,” the director says. “There’s this guy that I actually know personally from another paper, but my cynicism got the best of me. I told him that talking to one Israeli paper is already too much.”
Suleiman’s brusque statements about Israel might create the impression that he is a combative type. However, anyone who is even slightly familiar with his work knows that the mood in his films is completely different.
He has made just four full-length features (plus a few more shorts) in three decades, but this has been enough for him to develop what many more prolific filmmakers would die for: a unique cinematic language that has become identified with him; a cinematic style that makes it possible to watch just a scene or two and instantly identify the filmmaker.
In his films, Suleiman observes the world with a humorous but piercing gaze. He uses sly humor to reveal the ridiculousness, the absurdity, the pain and the human weaknesses that often lurk beneath the surface. He appears in all his films, always as the main character called “ES”: a silent character who hardly utters a sound; the eternal observer who invites the viewer to share his perspective, if only for a moment, on how things look from off to the side.
He uses dialogue sparingly, preferring instead to let the sights and sounds do the talking for him. Music plays a key role in his films, while the wonderfully composed shots and rigorous choreography of characters and objects sometimes scramble the existing order. Visual and physical humor, meanwhile, make the viewing experience thoroughly pleasurable.
In the absence of actual dialogue, Suleiman’s films often make use of symbols and similes. Sometimes, these are direct and clear, while at other times they are abstract and enigmatic – but nearly always amusing.
In 2002’s “Divine Intervention,” for instance – a love story about a Palestinian from Jerusalem and a girl from Ramallah whose relationship is made more difficult by the fact that the woman’s freedom of movement ends at an Israeli military checkpoint – there’s a scene in which the couple meets at a car lot near the checkpoint. They silently sit next to each other in the car, nervously exchanging glances until, at a certain point, the man pulls a red balloon out of his pocket and inflates it using a small gas canister. As the balloon inflates, a portrait of then-Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is revealed, beaming a broad smile.
Eventually, the man (played by Suleiman) lets go of the balloon and watches it drift into the sky. The soldiers posted at the roadblock grab binoculars to monitor it and when they identify the portrait of the man printed on it, angrily draw their weapons and request permission to shoot it down. The lovers take advantage of the distraction to sneak past the roadblock. The balloon, meanwhile, continues to float gently over olive groves, cross over the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, pass in front of Israeli flags fluttering in the breeze and, finally, it does a kind of festive dance around the golden Dome of the Rock.
Another scene, in “It Must Be Heaven,” shows the ES character after he has left Nazareth and is now living in Paris. In the oh-so-chic European capital, he goes out to buy a few groceries at the neighborhood store. But as he exits, clutching a few shopping bags, he freezes after noticing that all the passersby are carrying weapons. Men, women, children – they are all walking around with a rifle hanging over their shoulder as if it were some hot fashion accessory. When a taxi stops opposite him, a mother and daughter emerge, fully armed. The driver, meanwhile, opens the trunk and pulls out a rocket launcher that he nonchalantly hoists upon his shoulder.
The perspective of the protagonist in Suleiman’s films is always that of an exiled Palestinian who regards the world around him with somewhat melancholy humor. He exhibits a kind of innocence that manages to peel away the masks on human nature, and with a passivity that manages to extract some kind of existential truth from the chaos around him.
When Suleiman was awarded the prize in Reykjavik that December evening, it was said on stage that he was not a “political flag-waver or a militant director,” but someone who uses “another weapon: it’s called humor.”
From dropout to award winner
Thanks to his humorous perspective on the world, Suleiman has often been compared to silent comedy greats such as Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and even been dubbed “the Palestinian Charlie Chaplin.”
He was born in Nazareth in 1960, the youngest of five siblings. As a teen, he dropped out of school, went to London for a while, came back to the Galilee city and, at the age of 21, left again for New York. He snuck into film classes at New York University and began to study the medium while researching how Arabs are depicted in the Western media. He directed two award-winning short films there: “Introduction to the End of an Argument” (1990) and “Homage by Assassination” (1992). It is in the latter that the character of ES first appears.
In 1994, he moved to Jerusalem and taught film at Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah. Two years later he completed “Chronicle of a Disappearance.” This was a kind of cinematic diary of ES, a Palestinian director who returns to his homeland after being away for years. He wanders between Nazareth and Jerusalem, observing the reality in this place with an ironic, sharp and piercing gaze. He examines his family and the Israelis and the Palestinians at large. The personal seeps into the political and vice versa, until it is impossible to distinguish between the two.
A year later, in partnership with Israeli director Amos Gitai, he made “War and Peace in Vesoul” – a documentary in which the two filmmakers take a train to a film festival in the eponymous French city and discuss the situation in the Middle East, their films and the place where they grew up.
His second full-length feature, “Divine Intervention,” was selected for the official competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize and FIPRESCI International Film Critics award. Four years later, Suleiman was invited to serve as a jury member at the prestigious festival and in 2009 returned to present his next film, “The Time That Remains,” in the official competition.
This was a semi-autobiographical tale based on his family’s history since 1948. It told of relatives who were expelled from Israel and those who remained in Nazareth to live as a minority in the land of their birth.
A decade passed before his next (and most recent) film, “It Must Be Heaven,” which has yet to be screened in Israel. It too was screened in the official competition at Cannes and again left with two awards (an honorable mention and the FIPRESCI critics’ prize) – bolstering Suleiman’s reputation as the leading Palestinian filmmaker of his generation.
He once more plays his regular alter ego ES in “Heaven,” but this time as a silent Palestinian film director who wanders from his homeland to New York and Paris with the aim of making films. However, wherever he goes, he finds memories and reminders of the problems that characterize the homeland he has left behind. (Suleiman himself currently resides in Paris with his wife, Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan.)
Suleiman himself hastens to reject that “leading Palestinian filmmaker” tag.
“There’s no such thing as the ‘leading Palestinian filmmaker,’” he says. “Do you see us carrying a flag and I’m, like, in the front row?” Even if his films take place in Israel and Palestine, and deal with the complicated reality of this place, he has no intention of creating films that represent the Palestinian issue or give voice to his people.
“When you work on a film, you only work on something quite personal and intimate. A lot of doubts and existential questions come about [that are] nothing to do with nationality,” he says.
As he sees it, film is not a tool that allows for the sending of political messages, influencing positions or opinions or shaping awareness.
“That would be an illusion. I don’t think cinema really did anything anywhere, to anybody,” he states. “I don’t think cinema can change the world. Now, it’s obvious that maybe 50 years ago … cinema thought it had a role to play. But I don’t think of cinema as a nationalistic endeavor.
“I mean, it’s a complete contradiction: cinema travels and crosses borders; cinema is not supposed to actually put you in any kind of locale. When I make a scene in Nazareth, I don’t make it about Palestine – I make something about the world.”
Nor does he feel especially committed to being part of “Palestinian cinema,” or indeed Arab cinema in general.
“I don’t cater to other Palestinians or Arab films. I mean, people think that because I’m Arab, I was influenced. I never was. Why Arab films? I don’t get it. Either it’s a good film or it’s not a good film, you know? So, no, I’m not influenced by anything Arab. I’m influenced by Japanese [cinema], I’m influenced by Taiwanese [cinema], and by some of the French and some of the American filmmakers. I’m not exactly ‘pure blood’ in cinematic terms,” he says.
Chronicle of an absurdity
When he made his first feature, Suleiman experienced firsthand the nightmare suffered by many Palestinian-Israeli filmmakers. He was living at the time, as noted, in Jerusalem, where he began to raise money for “Chronicle of a Disappearance.” As an Israeli citizen, he was entitled to seek funding from the local film foundations, but was extremely wary of asking the Zionist state for financial aid. What tipped the balance, though, was the realization that this was money to which he was entitled.
What he couldn’t imagine, however, was how high a price he would have to pay for it. “I didn’t even need the money, I could have done the film without it,” he recounts, noting that 80 percent of the film’s budget was already covered by non-Israeli sources.
After consulting with various Palestinian political figures, he decided to apply for the Israeli financing and, after a protracted battle with the film fund that involved initial rejection and then lawyers, he eventually received what he now terms a “meager” contribution.
But that was only the beginning.
When “Chronicle of a Disappearance’ was invited to participate at the Venice Film Festival and Suleiman dared to present his film as “Palestinian,” the Israel Film Fund was furious, he recounts. “They said ‘Palestine does not exist’ and threatened to take me to prison, and asked me to give back the funds. Amos Gitai gave me the number of his lawyer, She told me, ‘You will go to prison because they can put you [in] prison [for] saying the film is Palestinian.’ So she threatened them to make this kind of scandalous press conference and say that the person you’re dragging to prison had just received the award in Venice, and that you should be ashamed of yourselves. And in fact, it worked. And then we had a meeting and we agreed that I will basically no longer bad-mouth the fund, and that they would agree to my terms.”
Suleiman also encountered another problem that Palestinian filmmakers who receive support from an Israeli fund have to contend with: He came under fire from many in the Arab world, who called him a traitor. Fortunately, the international success of his debut feature made it possible for him to raise money for his next film from European sources. He was no longer beholden to the Israeli funds, and has refused to screen his subsequent films at any Israeli festivals that receive government funding.
He says that today he tells young Palestinian filmmakers unequivocally not to accept money from the Israeli state. As he sees it, Israel is no longer just fascist but also monstrous on a certain level. He even expresses sympathy for Israelis who have to deal with the current situation. “I’m so glad I don’t live there anymore.”
Your family is still in Israel, you still come for visits and you still do your filming here. Do you see in all that some kind of hope for this place?
“No, not at all. It’s like looking at Chile in the 1970s. Or it’s like looking at countries who don’t realize they’re eating themselves from within. It’s the same air. … I mean, look how many Palestinians are being killed every day. They’re being assassinated, just like that. All in the name of ‘security’ still. This is how obnoxious fascism can be.”
In your films, you look at Israel with humor, which is both critical and ironic. But sometimes, it seems as if it also softens and doesn’t allow you depict the occupation at its very worst.
“I was brought up in a family and there was a lot of humor in the house, whether it was from my parents or my brothers. I was the youngest and always being influenced – so it was the environment I grew up in that actually made me who I am. Then, of course, you know, the political reality, social political reality that you start to observe – that starts to enter into the way you see things. And the way I started to see things, I had the burlesque and the humor.
“Nazareth, as I grew up in it, was never peaceful. But it was tender. Everybody knew each other. There were a lot of gardens and trees and ‘little town’ kind of stories, and you can see that from my films. If you watch ‘Chronicle of a Disappearance,’ there’s a kind of tenderness in the ambience, and in ‘Divine Intervention’ you see that the cruelty of the world has always infiltrated this place – that Nazareth has become a kind of ghetto with a lot of people living the despair that is typical of a ghetto, and the frustration about the political situation,” he continues.
“Historically, this kind of humor especially came in environments of despair. I don’t have a better example to tell you than the black humor of the ghettos in Europe when these people somehow knew they were approaching some form of finality. They still produced black humor, and I think also what happens in these situations is there’s quite a lot of poetry that … makes time more elastic. It makes it more present, let’s put it that way. And so it delays that awful fate that is awaiting them.
“Of course, I’m not saying Nazareth is a concentration camp. But you understand what I’m saying? I’m saying it’s the most intense form of humor that I think modern history witnesses, so there’s nothing to be exchanged by other words when I have humor in life. That’s what I’m saying.”
Your first films are set in Israel-Palestine, but the latest one is set mostly in New York and Paris. Is this because you are now less interested in this place after many years of living overseas?
“Not necessarily. Some of the scenes of the last film were written when I was living in New York in the ’90s [but] there was no necessity [at the time] to make such a film. The necessity came 20 years later, when I felt that now was the moment to make this – because of what I called many times ‘the Palestinization of the globe.’ … Due primarily to globalization and militarization, you have checkpoints now in different places; it just became a world of tension. So, when I’m making a film, I’m not just saying things about the man in Nazareth. I’m also saying things universally. So, no, it’s not that I lost interest. I just wanted to carry Palestine with me wherever I go.”
