An Arab couple is forced by the political tension in the Middle East to meet in the parking lot of the checkpoint that separates Israel from Palestine. He comes from Jerusalem; she, from Ramallah. To cross the checkpoint, which is prohibited for both, they have a balloon with the face of Yasir Arafat, first president of the Palestinian National Authority, with which the soldiers remain distracted. That scene of absurd humor fused with social reality of divine intervention (2002), in which he starred, could perfectly define the filmography of the most important Palestinian director of the last 30 years, Elia Suleiman (Nazareth, 63 years old). This escape from the serious and serious tone of the Arab-Israeli conflict could be the reason for the clear indications given by him for Thursday's interview: “No questions about politics.”
“I feel the pressure from the press who continue to ask me about Gaza all day. They want me to be a political representative. They don't realize that they carry with them a colonial discourse that locks you into a nationality, even if not all my films have to do with Palestine,” says Suleiman, who has arrived in Madrid to a film series that the Filmoteca dedicates to him in January and February. The winner of four awards at Cannes has been receiving an avalanche of questions about his opinion on the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, which has left more than 25,000 dead. It is inevitable, however, both because of his work and because of his thinking, that he enters that field: “They continue to say the Arab-Israeli conflict and it is not a conflict. It is the occupation of one country by another,” he says at the Cine Doré, where his four feature films and several of his short films will be screened.
Despite flooding his narrative with a crude, supernatural humor that draws on the slapstick of silent cinema, Suleiman also plagues his images with violence, of Israeli soldiers targeting civilians, of Arabs with their hands tied and blindfolded or of police officers searching houses. “When I started to compose the images in editing (I edit my films when writing the script), sometimes feelings of melancholy and laughter coexist, or of despair, because that's where many moments of humor come from, quoting Boris Vian. “I spent months, even years, trying to make that kind of cosmos exist between all the different emotions we experience, even the violence of everyday life.”
The film by Suleiman – who began his career in the early nineties, being an undocumented immigrant in New York – that addresses the war between Israel and Palestine in a more frontal way is The Time That Remains (2009). The film intertwines the history of the director's family with the Israeli occupation; It begins in 1948 with the taking of Nazareth and with the filmmaker's father being part of the resistance army. Suleiman represents himself, as in all of his films, through the character of ES, who is mute. The context of the story, which spans 60 years of conflict, is adverse, but, as in the rest of his productions, the confrontation occurs out there, most of the time outside the frame, tangentially. What matters is the story of the family that is inevitably shaken by events.
“Some festivals didn’t want my film because it wasn’t Palestinian enough.”
“To tell the world, you have to let go of the moral and ethical responsibilities you think you have. You must take a necessary distance from the facts so as not to be reactive or impulsive and construct complex images, because if you start making pamphlet statements, your film will be ephemeral in time,” says Suleiman, who fled to London in his adolescence to avoid a arrest warrant for alleged criminal activities. In his images there are ordinary people who have had to live under these conditions, they are Arab neighbors who live in a Nazareth under Israeli control.
Hatred against the Jews flows among them, but also banal conversations and concerns: gossip with the other neighbor, some village anecdote or an outdated joke. They are characters who, on many occasions, are copies of Suleiman's neighbors in Nazareth, which he defines as a ghetto. “It is normal that they clash with each other, not having prosperity or means, but they also tell jokes, talk about this and that.”
Yeah The Time That Remains It is the film that most directly addresses the occupation of Palestine, its most recent production, It Must Be Heaven (2019), is the one that leaves it the most on the sidelines. It contains the constants of his filmography: many visual gags that have paired him with Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Roy Anderson; a fragmented structure that repeats comic characters and situations; and scenes full of biting and sharp humor. However, it is the only film that does not only take place in Palestine, but also in New York and Paris: Suleiman faces the internationalization of his condition as a Palestinian.
As the situation was not so evident, the film had problems finding exhibition spaces: “Some festivals did not want the film because it was not Palestinian enough. “The director of a very important festival said the same thing to one of my actors.” He did not hesitate to put that absurd scene in the film, which could only happen in real life. “They accept a film when it fits their schedule. Now, if it has clichés, even better, for example, if it is an Israeli who falls in love with a Palestinian, she will surely win a prize.”
Suleiman, recognized in 2022 with a special award by the European Film Academy, denounces the hypocrisy of the West that uses the flag of Palestine when it suits its objectives. “You have countries that have committed massacres like France or Germany and now deny the Palestinian genocide. The first genocide deny the genocide [denunciado por Sudáfrica en La Haya]”, he asserts, already totally absorbed in the discussion and with his precept of no politics forgotten. “The problem is that we want to continue as we were until now. Fascism is creeping everywhere, in Asia, in Argentina, but also in Berlin, with galleries being blackmailed not to show works that go against the occupation. “I'm not so sure when the story will unravel, but if we don't open our eyes to this kind of creepy way we're being, we're going to face some serious problems.”
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