Elia Suleiman Interview on Palestinian Director: Sarajevo Film Fest

Elia Suleiman has not lost hope.

The Palestinian filmmaker, who will receive the honorary Heart of Sarajevo award at the 2024 Sarajevo Film Festival, has spent his career chronicling the experiences of his people, and the politics of the troubled Middle East. His features: Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), Divine Intervention (2002), The Time That Remains (2009) and It Must Be Heaven (2019), avoid polemics by using deadpan humor and minimal dialogue, with a focus on the everyday resistance of ordinary people.

That resistance is personified by Suleiman’s on-screen character “E.S.,” a silent, Buster Keaton-like figure who bears witness to the absurdities of life as experienced by Israeli Arabs (such as himself, he was born in Nazareth in 1960) and the citizens of Gaza as a window into the wider world.

Since the Oct.7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and the Israeli bombing and land invasion of Gaza, the wider world is again watching as violent men decide the fate of the region.

Being a Palestinian artist, says Suleiman, “puts you in a kind of an alienated position vis-à-vis the world, as you wonder about the horrors happening in Palestine and the governments that are supporting that horror.” But amid the darkness, the director remains surprisingly hopeful about the possibility for change, and of art as a form of resistance. “Art marches a lot slower than bullets,” he says. “We might not see change in our lifetime, [but] the accumulation of production of culture that inspires freer people might eventually have some kind of result.”

Congratulations on the honor at Sarajevo. You’ve been coming to the festival for many years, what is it that links you and Sarajevo?

I don’t really know what it is, but I think I’ve had it from the first time I was here. There’s something very familiar about this city. It’s not a political or intellectual connection — at least not consciously — it’s more an emotional one. I identify with the city, with the festival and with the people. I get invited every year and I’ve been the president of the jury, I’ve screened my films there, I’ve done a couple of master classes. I think I’ve been there once without any reason at all. It’s become like a family thing. Maybe the political story of the place has added something to the people and the festival, that they have a certain identification with a number of causes connected to films, but there is just something humane and nice about Sarajevo.

You are getting a career achievement award and I want to talk about your career, but the issue of Gaza looms large so I’d thought we should address it immediately. As a Palestinian, and a Palestinian filmmaker, what has changed for you since October 7 and since the start of the war in Gaza?

That is an interesting question because nothing’s changed. I was beginning on a new project, starting to jot down ideas, seeing which would linger, but when [Oct. 7] happened, everything stopped. I make very few films, with years in between, and I make them out of mostly personal experiences, so I need to experience a certain ambiance, and I need to sponge up the global ambiance. Since the start of the war, for the first months, I deserted the writing, because I found out that I don’t yet have anything to say. I just got back to it actually, even though the war is still going on. I don’t know why I’m calling it a war now: The genocide is going on and it’s getting worse. So I’ve started toying with ideas for my next film, started trying to put myself to work.

But I don’t think it’s really a question of being Palestinian. The fact that I’m Palestinian adds a certain layer of familiarity with the place, because I know people from all over Palestine. And being a Palestinian filmmaker puts you in a kind of an alienated position vis-à-vis the world, as you wonder about the horrors happening in Palestine and the governments that are supporting that horror. It makes you feel less hopeful about any possible change. But finally, it is about globalization — that there is power and money and multinationals with interests in militarization and fascism.

Israel is not the only place that is fascist, by the way. If you look around, half the countries in Europe are going that way. There is a right-wing, atmosphere that is truly frightening in Europe. In the States as well, of course. There are a lot of these people who support these kinds of regimes — this bloodthirsty, extreme conservatism, the extreme far-right, the Neo Nazis, are sprouting up everywhere. So [as a Palestinian] it puts you in a strange place. In order to keep going, you need to have a little hope and know that things can change. But of course, you start to wonder sometimes if it’s really hope or the illusion of hope.

I went back to reading [Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor] Primo Levi, who I used to be absolutely attached to for so long. I used to carry his books with me on my travels. When [Oct. 7] happened, I went back to his writings to see how people felt back then. If you [were] living, say, as a Jew in France at the time, you [were] basically worried about your neighbor turning you into the police. If you think about how people used to live in that moment, the ambiance is so horrifying. It makes you wonder about how people survived such extremities. And that makes me think people in Gaza now, with their daily routines of receiving one-ton bombs on top of their heads, and having their children buried under the ground. It is a weird, strange moment, in the history of humanity.

Have you seen a different reaction to you personally, as a Palestinian artist since Oct. 7?

Personally, no. I have witnessed other people being censored, galleries closing, artists being exiled and not allowed to work, people being fired. But, like you, I just read all of this stuff. I knew quite a few people who went to Berlin because it was supposedly such a free city, and really got trapped, because its suddenly wasn’t a free city, and found themselves controlled and interrogated. But personally, no, I haven’t experienced anything. Let’s wait until I have a script ready for my next film and see the reaction to that before we say if things have changed.

All your films deal with darkness in the world but they usually end on a moment of hope. I have to think of the final dancing scene in the gay club in It Must Be Heaven. Do you see any hope in the situation for Palestinians in Gaza at the moment?

Again, it’s not only Palestinians, but I think we are living in a world where you see more and more younger people who are, less or even non-nationalistic. They are activists, and they want to live without having any ideologies stuck on them. They want to be free and they have their own definitions of how they can be so. In France, you have a lot of young people who are really fantastic, doing activism that is not just militant, it’s culture. Just like that last scene in It Must Be Heaven. You have similar people everywhere in the world. It’s very touching to see because they are trying to find ways to express themselves freely, even if, in certain countries, it has to be done cautiously, because Big Brother is always watching. That bar I filmed at is a real Palestinian gay and lesbian bar and those are the actual people who go to these kinds of bars — they weren’t extras I brought in. After filming, quite a few of them ended up in hospital with injuries caused by the Israeli police. It’s not easy to arrest people just for expressing joy, for dancing, for poetry, for jamming on guitars in the bars, for not doing anything against the law. But they pose a threat to the system, because they are free, willing people, and that is a menace to the system. That happens everywhere in the world. The second you have any kind of art or culture or poetry, it becomes suspicious for the ruling authorities.

It’s just that art marches a lot slower than bullets. So change maybe won’t come right away, maybe not in our lifetime, but that accumulation of the production of culture, of freer people, might eventually have a result. I’m saying this because if you look at the past 200 years, let’s say we came from a place where there was slavery and things have shifted. There are still some forms of slavery around the world, but it’s no longer seen as legitimate for colonial powers to just go to Africa and ship 20 million people across the ocean, throwing quite a few of them into the sea. There were and are other horrors, from the First and Second World War, there are still a lot of humans damaging other humans’ lives. But the fact is, things do change. Maybe through this slow accumulation of art and freedom, we may find a way ahead to a better world. I think the production of art is important for the production of hope.

Is that your goal in making movies, the production of hope?

I think the minimum that I can do is to produce pleasure. Through cinema, to make moments of pleasure, that the spectators can share, and to give a sense of consolation that some of us are still there not looking to do evil. It’s about producing tenderness, which actually can produce that kind of hope. I think when people have pleasure in their lives, they get less anxious and maybe less violent towards themselves and others. I see a couple leaving a film of mine feeling hungry, that’s gratifying because that means they are going to enjoy their dinner. The point is not that they talk or don’t talk about the film. The point is the feeling or emotion they take out of the cinema that seeps through their different senses, and they want to extend that pleasure. I know that this is not solving the Palestinian issue, but I always have a feeling that it does add something.

You have all these movements, from the LGBT or African American movement in the States, that are saying the same thing: ‘We want to be free.’ They identify with Gaza, but they also want to better their own lives. So you can see that Gaza can become a catalyst for change in a lot of parts in the world, as people identify injustices there, they also see the injustices where they live and what they witness. It’s more complex than that, of course, but I think when you see injustice in one place, you start to connect it to injustice in your everyday life.

Humor has always been at the core of your films. People compare you to Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton, but you say they weren’t your inspiration. Where does your humor come from? Is it from your family?

Exactly! You nailed it. It comes from my family. I’m the youngest of five, and my parents were quite tender and funny and humorous. There was always laughter in the house. A lot of the stuff you see in my films, I nicked for my brothers. They would come to me and say: “I have a story for you. It’s got to be in the film” and I’d write it down and say, give me more. Growing up in a small town that gradually became a ghetto [Nazareth] produced the kinds of characters that I put in my film, who might despair, but they are also funny. Because in every ghetto there is despair and there’s humor.

Do you see humor as a form of political resistance?

Yes, but it isn’t just humor, it isn’t just my films. I think art is a form of resistance. Conducting your daily life can be a form of resistance. Being ecologically aware can be a form of resistance. Poetry is a form of resistance. Making life beautiful is a form of resistance. My films are just the way I see things. When I’m sitting in a cafe and see something that has potential, cinematic potential, I write it down. It’s just a sensation then it has to be developed, but there’s always [something] from daily life which is the point of departure into the cinematic world. It is a form of resistance, but it’s not a strategy. It’s what tickles me from within, and then I toy with it to make sure the humor is complex and layered, with social and political dimensions. That takes a long time in solitude to imagine, and to imagine how others will see it. Because you don’t make films for yourself, you make films to share. I want to make sure the people in Norway or Iceland can also watch these same moments and have their own connectedness with them. I don’t give history lessons, I don’t care for history lessons. Maybe my films can get people intrigued to go and learn more but that’s not what’s in the films themselves. But when it comes to humor, yes, it is essential. Looking at this cruel world we live in, if I didn’t have the humor, I think I would die.

It also seems to me it would be impossible to compete with the real horror, with the violent images, we see on TV and social media.

Yes. I don’t use violence in my films or only very rarely. Maybe one moment here, one moment there. I’ve turned my back on these horrific, polluting images that the television produces for the news. I have no social media whatsoever. I don’t want to live in that world. It’s too noisy for me. That’s the one thing that gets me anxious: The noise of the world. One has to really protect oneself. If we’re talking about resistance, if you want to create more art and more pleasure, about the need for tenderness or connectedness, you need to turn your back on the noise.