This year’s edition of Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) showcases rising talent and venerates established luminaries with a terrific selection of cinematic gems. This year’s festival will also pay tribute to the highly acclaimed Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman who travels to Dublin for the Festival. On March 1st, DIFF will host a retrospective on Suleiman at the IFI, where they will screen his 2002 award-winning black comedy Divine Intervention, which contrasts day to-day banality with the reality of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and his latest film, the 2019 roman-á-clef travel comedy, It Must Be Heaven, depicting himself travelling to Paris and New York to acquire funding for a film concept.
Only a few hours before the ceasefire in Gaza was announced on January 15th, Elia called from his current residence in France to talk with Totally Dublin about his work. Elia starts the conversation by discussing how his work is atypical of what people would expect from the region’s cinema.
“I search for the moments in the margin, in order to, somehow, reflect on the general mood of the place, and I wouldn’t go in linear terms and just show tanks and army invasions,” he explains. “I did a bit of that in another film, called The Time That Remains. […] There, I had to stick to the facts. It’s a little bit more epic-like. […]
“But, generally, the way I make my films, it’s always by signalling and not by being blunt because it doesn’t give me pleasure to just put an Israeli soldier torturing a Palestinian; it’s just not the cinematic language that I’m engaged in and I would say I don’t want to be engaged in.
“I don’t really like to watch films that have too much ‘sloganistic’ type of images since we’re dealing, after all, with cinema, and cinema is an art, and it’s a universal art, and what you need to focus on is how to metamorphose the moment that you picked up from your daily life to an aesthetic tableau or dimension of some sort.”
Elis feels this method also has a means of disarming people who would be resistant to Middle Eastern cinema. “The fact that if you are an uninvolved person, you wouldn’t want to go and watch a Palestinian film because, right away, your preconception is, ‘This is going to be about tragedy, and victims, and all that. I don’t want to watch this; I want to watch a good Netflix movie while I’m having dinner,” he says.
“Maybe a few of those saw the film, and maybe it reduced their stereotypes about what a Palestinian film is because they were able to see images that they enjoyed, and some dialogue, and some humour, and all that.”
As a result of his iconoclastically comedic films, Elia has had to flee his homeland for years at a time due to, as he claims, Israeli media editing his statements at Cannes to appear anti-Semitic or that he supports suicide bombers in the region. For Elia, doing comedic work can be more threatening than dramatic or documentary work.
“Generally, I can tell you, even in my personal case, that the system hates films that have humour because it escapes them from trying to nail down and put guilt and guilty accusations,” he explains. “Because humour ruptures that, and systems are so much about control and they feel they’ve lost control in one fraction of a second, that gets them to be destabilized.
“Similarly, one could say, for example, that poetry has that same effect. Of course, we all know how hated poets are by the regimes. If you’re an artist, that’s already catastrophic, but the poet… And humour has that effect because it ruptures time, so it already has that question mark. You’re no longer just going with the flow; the rapture causes you to reflect for a second, and, also, you sense a kind of pleasure from your laughter, therefore you want more of that, and that also becomes too much for the regime to handle. I’ve personally lived this; the Israelis, so many of them hated my guts because of the humour. It’s even been said, bluntly, ‘Why don’t you just use violence? This mocking reduces us from existing,’ which is [Laughs] quite ironic.”
Elia finds humour also eases the spirits of the Palestinians during difficult times. “When people come to see any of my films, they come to see my films,” he says. “They don’t blame me for the humour; just the contrary, they want to actually have humour and they want to enjoy themselves.
“That includes the Palestinians. It’s not like they come and say, ‘This is not proper for a time like this,’ or anything. The Palestinians are really keen to watch films with humour and watch cultural films. When my films screen back home, it’s a madhouse! I don’t think this is an issue for the victims of the situation. Just the contrary; they find pleasure in it and they find a moment where they can console themselves.”
Beyond humour and irreverence, Elia is deeply interested in making films with a spiritual, universal and transcending quality, akin to those written about in Paul Schrader’s essay Transcendental Style in Film.
He says, “In a general way, when you capture a cinematic moment – regardless of what it is – if it has that universality, even people who do not do the same thing, like the ones I film, they have an identification of a sort, to the extent, sometimes, that they think they have done it, one way or another. So, that’s what cinema does; it makes you feel like you’re in a process of identification, whatever you are witnessing.”
This universality is part of Elia’s desire to see an eradication of ‘them and us’ mentalities that are perpetuated by borders and geopolitics, in an attempt to get people to view everyone as part of the same human experience, which he feels will bring about global equality and freedom for all oppressed people. But he is aware that his art is only one piece in the overall mosaic to achieve that, and he felt that the actions of Hamas on October 7th, 2023 erected a huge wall that prevented people from seeing that world. “So, a few years after my film, I would say that at least annulled any possibility of further understanding for the persons who don’t have a background about what’s going on and don’t have a historic perspective,” he says of the attacks.
“They, basically, just moved their anti-Palestinian emotions because of what Hamas did that day. Then, after that, when the genocide started to take form, those people may have, let’s say, objectified their positions and said, ‘Oh, but this is a genocide,’ you know? I don’t think that films, in general, do any kind of benefit for awareness of a situation. I would say culture does; that means the subtotal of culture, not just “It Must Be Heaven.”
The October 7th attacks and the resulting genocide have had a huge impact on Elia, who admits that he cannot even imagine what the victims are going through. “I have been in a status quo myself since October 7th started,” he admits. “I couldn’t write a word because I find myself feeling like when you had the Second World War, where you had a ‘before’ and ‘after,’ and I cannot grasp the ambience of this ‘after,’ which is a necessity for me because, most of the time, what happens in my process is I stay alert to sponge the ambience and to see where the world is heading.
“It’s difficult for me now, in the middle of something going on. How do I sit down and write something that’s, let’s say, induced with poetics or induced with humour? It’s very difficult, so I’ve been on hold, thinking, ‘When is this nightmare going to end, so I can start to feel what the world looks like and what it might look like after?’”
This connectivity is important for Elia’s process. Since his first film, Chronicle of A Disappearance, in 1996, the feature films he has released are quite sparse, with only four out at the time of writing. “People ask me all the time, ‘How come it takes you so long to make another film? Seven to ten years?” Elia says.
“The fact is, I don’t have a story. I just simply have to bring in what the poetic tells me and what the sense of pleasure tells me, and I have to have faith that what I’m saying or reflecting on is what he or she also has the same feeling for.”
Materialistically, the economics of his films also contributes to the wait, as he admits they cost a lot of money which does not see a return on investment. “You need that support that comes from people who believe in what you’re doing, and, therefore, for them, culturally, it’s important and, artistically, it’s important, and it’s less important than the financial aspect,” he says of getting his films financed.
“You can never escape the financial aspect, anyway, because there’s always somebody who wants to make more money. In other words, the distributor, the salesperson, even when they love what you do, they want to make a buck, you know? For them, it’s part of the sustenance. So, sometimes these people accept the financial difficulties they face with your film because they’re making it somewhere else with a commercial product.
“So, the sales agency might be making very commercial films in order to have some surplus that could go into a couple of these artistic films. But, I have to say, every time I finance a film, it takes years, and every time I finance a film, it’s risky, and every time it’s a question mark, and every time it’s potentially not happening, and, so far, luckily, I have not written a film that went to the waste. Hopefully, the next one, too, whenever that will happen.”
Except for his first film, Elia’s feature-lengths have had the backing of several European countries, which has banked him a lot of awards and acclaim on the continent. However, he feels that this avenue for a guarantee may no longer be an option due to the rise of the far-right in European politics.
“I think there’s definitely a deep-rooted fascism that’s resurfacing again,” Elia says of Europe today. “You can see this in countries, with their abolishing of the cultural angle of things. In Germany, for example, they have cancelled a lot of funds, they’re limiting the budgets on artists. I’m not saying on Palestinian artists; I’m saying on artists in general.
“This is where the menace can come from: it can raise questions and dialogue, and challenge the status quo. So, I think the right-wing everywhere immediately starts asking for a cultural product that only roots the right-winger. That means ‘sloganistic’, propaganda-type of populist cultural roots, which I think is happening in Germany in a big way because they’re cancelling things all the time that are not only connected to Palestine.
“It starts to seem like they’re going in that route, that Palestine is a concept for progressive notions, so if you’re cancelling something Palestinian, you’re actually cancelling something to do with any kind of liberation movement or questioning the regimes.
“I think art suffers and culture suffers all the time when there’s a fascistic spirit coming to take hold of power. And I think this is happening in a lot of places, unfortunately. I don’t know if this is something reversible or not. I don’t know how we will live in a few years, regarding the creative process.”
The Retrospective of Elia Suleiman will take place at the IFI, Dublin on March 1st as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, which takes place from February 20th to March 5th. To buy tickets and see the full programme for this year’s festival, go to diff.ie.
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
