Original-Cin Q&A: Palestinian director Elia Suleiman talks about his absurdist approach to inflammatory reality
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-minus
Director Elia Suleiman has a distinctive place in global cinema, not only because he’s a Palestinian filmmaker, but because he brings an unexpectedly wistful, absurdist style to an inflammatory subject.
Dividing his time between teaching and filmmaking, the 59-year-old Paris-based Suleiman, manages to work when the muse moves him. His latest, It Must Be Heaven, which had its debut at the Cannes film festival last year, is only his the fourth dramatic feature.
It Must Be Heaven features Suleiman playing his alter-ego, ES, a Buster Keaton-like silent character, who travels from his hometown of Nazareth - the Palestinian majority city within the Israeli borders - and travels to Paris and New York, two cities where the filmmaker has lived. Like Sulieman, ES is seeking financing for a film, which seems to be the film we’re actually watching.
Elia Suleiman travels the world looking for funding in the bizarro It Must Be Heaven
In France, a producer explains that his theme doesn’t seem Palestinian enough. At a film class, a pretentious film professor (Montreal theatre director Guy Sprung) presses him to discuss nationality and identity. In New York, Mexican movie star, Gael Garcia Bernal, introduces him to a woman producer who politely dismisses him.
Mostly, It Must Be Heaven consists of a series of vignettes and sight gags – cops on drill begin to dance, a persistent bird keeps landing on his computer keyboard. Some of it is delicately playful, other moments laugh-out funny, with a recurrent awareness of armed and uniformed authority figures everywhere: In Nazareth, Israeli soldiers driving in a car with a kidnapped woman in Paris, tanks in a Bastille Day parade and, in one of ES’s nightmares, an upscale Manhattan grocery store with gun-packing shoppers.
We spoke by phone.
ORIGINAL-CIN: This is a strange film to watch at this moment, because of the coronavirus. It’s as if it has been eclipsed by reality – the empty silent Paris streets, gun-toting shoppers on the streets of New York.
SULEIMAN: “I know. Now it could be labelled a horror movie.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: I’m curious with how you come up with the specific scenes --the dancing policeman, the fashion models strutting through Paris streets, the bird on the typewriter. Do they spring entirely from your imagination at your desk, or from observed experience?
SULEIMAN: “I’d say 99.9 percent of what’s in my films comes from some departure point from reality. In the case of the bird, if you want to hear the anecdote, my wife [Yasmine Hamdan] is a singer and composer. She did a concert in the south of France and a baby bird fell from a tree and, maybe it had no parents, so she decided to bring it home.
“Since she had rehearsals outside the house and I was home writing scripts, she asked me to take care of the bird. I put the bird on my desk with some food and water and, the bird at some point, jumped on my computer.
“It usually starts with moments like that. I take a lot of long walks, I sit in cafes, I travel a lot. And I write notes all the time. The imagined world of the films takes a very long time before I even begin to write a technical script - you know -- how many steps the character in the frame has to take – all before I even rehearse or do a set up.
“My scripts are a lot about calculating steps, right? Because it’s so choreographic, and it has to have a musicality.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: You’ve said in interviews that pleasure is always political. Would it be fair to say you’re also trying to rise above politics?
SULEIMAN: “More than fair. I do think that everything is political. I mean, look, look at the coronavirus and how much politics there is in that? Your everyday life is filled with political acts, including what you choose to eat.
“And if you’re creating fiction, you’re creating a time and space that is deviant from the one that is imposed on us, by the state and politicians and the multinationals. So, cinema is political because you are inventing a time and space format that has been prepared for you to take.
“Having said that, you don’t strategize. You don’t say I’m against the regime so I’ll do this! You basically take a deep interior dive, a meditative journey and you come out with the images you come out with.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: One of the things your policemen reminded me of was the Keystone Cops of the silent era, and how mechanical and unnatural these displays of authority are.
SULEIMAN: “Well, I just sort of exposing the bare bones of it -- but especially during the coronavirus, the police displays are even more absurd and burlesque than ever. Sometimes I look out my window and I say to myself, ‘Did I have anything to do with the coronavirus?’ because the behavior of the police looks so similar to what happens in the film.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: As someone whose life and work is tied up in matters of identity and oppression, how do you find the emotional distance from the violence and chaos to create your work?
SULEIMAN: “I can’t really answer that in words because it’s ah … a spiritual way of existing which, is not only about making these kind of images, but a way of life.
“It’s not like the day my film is finished I become an everyday person in the neo-liberal economy that we exist in. I’m quite aware, all the time, of somehow trying to ignite hope and better myself.
“There’s a constant, sometimes tiresome, self-evaluation and a lot of existential questions. But I work quite hard on myself to bring more tenderness into my life and the lives of what I imagine. It’s not just about the art of the image, but also about the art of living.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: So, I assume you’re not working two or three projects ahead?
SULEIMAN. “Oh, I like that one. As you can see by my filmography, I make a film every seven or eight years. I’m wondering what I’m going to do with myself now I’ve finished a film. And now there’s the coronavirus and I’m not a coronavirus script writer.
“I only come up with a script when I feel the need to make a film. I have to live and sit and wait for the pen to start moving by itself and tell me something.
“Actually, this period has been good because it has given me a chance to actually watch films – I have a home cinema in my apartment --which is something I haven’t done for decades.
“I’m not talking about recent ones. I’m watching older films, particularly Japanese ones. I would say I started to make films because of [Yosujiro] Ozu. Tokyo Story was the first film I saw on a big screen that I saw and thought, “Maybe I could make something like this.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: As I’m sure you know, a lot of critics see your work in the tradition of great silent clowns like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Were they influences, or did you just arrive at a similar place through a different route?
SULEIMAN: “After I made my first feature, people started talking about Keaton and Tati, and then I discovered them. I don't have that much of a deep cinema education, or I did not when I started making films. I don't go to the cinema except if it's a filmmaker that I know I love.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: I know you’ve done some film festivals, including Cannes and TIFF. But are you disappointed you can’t be on the road promoting the film in person?
SULEIMAN: “I spent a year travelling to promote the film and I have to tell you, I'm really happy not to be traveling for a while. It's enough to be able to go outside for a walk. I've had more than enough from the airplanes and especially the airports – and all those checkpoints.”
It Must Be Heaven is available virtually thorough select cinemas on June 12th and then widely on VOD June 19th.