Meet Elia Suleiman, Palestinian silent comedy auteur

Writer, director and actor Elia Suleiman explores Palestinian statelessness and displacement through deadpan slapstick, as in his latest film, ‘It Must Be Heaven’.

Elia Suleiman in his 2019 film, ‘It Must Be Heaven’. Source: Wild Bunch

Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman is a unique artist, perplexing the world just as much as he is perplexed by it. In It Must Be Heaven, his latest film, Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal introduces him to an American producer: “He’s a Palestinian filmmaker, but he makes funny films,” he deadpans.

‘Funny films’ is a reductive description for what Suleiman produces. He presents the realities of Palestinian existence – from displacement to living under constant surveillance – and heightens them to absurd lengths. In Suleiman’s eyes, a checkpoint crossing becomes a fashion show catwalk, and the Israel West Bank wall becomes a barrier for pole vaulting. But throughout, his mute, stony face observes these episodes, much like French filmmaker Jacques Tati, but clouded by the shadow of oppression.

Writer, director, actor Elia Suleiman in ‘It Must Be Heaven’. Source: Wild Bunch

Born in 1960 in Nazareth, Suleiman has never seen a free Palestinian state. At 15, Elia dropped out of school, eventually leaving Nazareth for London after being accused of being a gang leader. “Actually, I’m a total coward,” he told

The Independent

of the time. It was when he immigrated to New York at age 21 that he discovered a love of film, citing Yasujirō Ozu’s film Tokyo Story as inspirational, and having

friends sneak him in

to film classes at New York University.

After a decade in New York, Suleiman made his filmmaking debut, co-directing the 1990 experimental documentary

Introduction To The End Of An Argument

with Lebanese–Canadian artist Jayce Salloum. However, the foundations of Suleiman’s style began in his 1993 fiction short debut,

Homage By Assassination

, starring himself as his silent alter-ego writing a script in his New York apartment. The gags are subtle, including his disconnected phone line and typing on a Western keyboard with Arabic letters taped on the keys, slyly commenting on his displacement.

Those elements transferred over to his 1996 feature film debut, Chronicles Of A Disappearance, depicting Suleiman’s return to Nazareth and his witnessing interactions between locals, many of whom are played by the directors’ friends and family. The film was financed by the

Israeli Fund For Quality Films

, which he had to fight to access, and his efforts were rewarded when the film won the best first film prize at Venice Film Festival.

‘It Must Be Heaven’. Source: Wild Bunch

The scales increased again on his next two feature films, 2002’s Divine Intervention and 2009’s The Time That Remains, with CGI allowing Suleiman to create ambitious sketches. However, between darkly comic scenes involving gunfights and exploding tanks, Suleiman weaves deeply human stories. Divine Intervention details Suleiman’s efforts to meet his lover, the two separated by Israeli checkpoints. The film was well-received, especially at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, receiving a nomination for the Palme d’Or and winning the Jury Prize. Despite those accolades, the film was

denied submission

for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars because Palestine wasn’t formally recognised by the United Nations. The Academy conceded at their next ceremony, with the dramatic thriller Paradise Now becoming the first Palestinian film to be nominated for an Oscar.

With The Time That Remains, Suleiman told an epic story detailing his family and the loss of the Palestinian state, beginning with the

1948 Arab–Israeli War

when his father was a resistance fighter, dramatising his father’s diaries on the time. While humorous, the film is a sombre affair, finding black comedy within the traumas of occupation.

Whether it’s a feature film or something small, like the

music videos

he’s directed for his wife, Lebanese pop star Yasmine Hamdan, Suleiman’s films are united by his silent presence. This has led to his filmmaking being compared to Tati’s while his looks have been likened to Buster Keaton’s, despite his never seeing films by either until after he’d made Chronicles Of A Disappearance.

“My films have a silent movie aspect only because I don’t know much about making films,” he explained to

The Guardian

of his initial use of silence. As his experience grew, that silence became integral to his films, with Suleiman telling

Filmmaker Magazine

he is operating “as a referential, translucent guide of some kind. I feel I am there not for you to look at me, per se, but to spread the vision elsewhere”. He also compares his silent presence to the political concept of the ‘

Present Absentee

’, which he explained to

Bomb Magazine

as: “Palestinians who remained in their own land as absentees so that [colonisers] could confiscate all of their property.”

‘It Must Be Heaven’. Source: Wild Bunch

After a long absence from the screen, Suleiman has returned with this new feature film, It Must Be Heaven. That absence was due to the difficulty of funding the film, something satirised in a scene featuring Wild Bunch producer Vincent Maraval explaining to Suleiman that his film isn’t “Palestinian enough”.

While It Must Be Heaven sees Suleiman travel from Nazareth to Paris and New York City, he can’t help but see Palestinian parallels everywhere. In Paris, Bastille Day celebrations see the city overrun by a heavy military presence, while from a street corner in New York he sees everyone carrying semi-automatic weapons like designer handbags. He describes these scenes as representing the “Palestinisation of the world”, explaining to

Sight And Sound magazine

that it triggered the making of this film.

“Global violence is the state of exception that everyone lives in,” he says. “And having myself lived everywhere, I’ve taken in this Palestinisation of the world, where it’s no longer just in local geopolitical areas – it’s actually everywhere you go. We’ve become traumatised by the sound of sirens. I wait sometimes to see that it’s an ambulance or the fire department, and not a police car.”

With the number of hurdles in the way, leading to long periods between each film, filmmaking is a Sisyphean task for Elia Suleiman that would ignite hopelessness in most. But, as he tells

Electronic Intifada

, as long as he’s making films, he has hope. “I think by de facto, that the very act of the making of a film, is an act emerging from hope. So questions that surround hopelessness are in contradiction to the actual fact that there is a film. There is only hope. Otherwise I wouldn’t be making films.”