Elia Suleiman: ​‘I was a street kid who became a bum – but a think­ing bum’

Over the course of five fea­tures in the last quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry, Nazareth-born film­mak­er Elia Suleiman has cre­at­ed a dis­tinc­tive per­son­al cin­e­ma which he uses to inves­ti­gate the trou­bled cir­cum­stances of his Pales­tin­ian ori­gins. Employ­ing com­e­dy for a seri­ous pur­pose, with his own sad-eyed screen pres­ence often a poignant silent observ­er at the heart of the action, his work has drawn com­par­isons to the likes of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati.

Obvi­ous ref­er­ence points, per­haps, but not exact­ly for­ma­tive influ­ences for this self-made and unique screen tal­ent. His most recent offer­ing, It Must Be Heav­en, is a wry rumi­na­tion on whether trav­el real­ly does broad­en one’s per­spec­tives. It pre­miered in com­pe­ti­tion at Cannes and has since been held up in the pan­dem­ic release back­log. This inter­view took place dur­ing the 2019 BFI Lon­don Film Festival.

LWLies: The fam­i­ly res­i­dence in Nazareth has often fea­tured in your films, but now that both par­ents have passed on, has that altered your sense of home?

It’s des­tined to hap­pen, real­ly. Inevitably, you lose your fam­i­ly, you lose your con­nec­tion to the place you’re from, then you start to feel that you’ve rein­vent­ed your­self as a cit­i­zen of the world. I’ve lived a nomadic life, in New York and then in Paris, where I’ve been based for some years. And you realise the world-cit­i­zen idea was just an illu­sion you’d been hav­ing, because the world has turned into one homogenised, glob­alised place. Where trav­el used to seem like a reju­ve­nat­ing expe­ri­ence, now it’s almost redun­dan­cy. The air­port is a place of trau­ma wher­ev­er you go, Tel Aviv, Heathrow, New York. The way they look at you, check­points every­where. Some­how I’m back at the place I start­ed out from.

But, for you, this is prime mate­r­i­al for comedy?

As you can see with my pre­vi­ous work, I’m not real­ly capa­ble of tak­ing things seri­ous­ly. I like to get some laugh­ter out of the Pales­tini­an­i­sa­tion of the world and this glob­al despair. Thank­ful­ly, the film has a few more gags than the rhetoric I’m spin­ning just now.

We’re now get­ting the hang of what an Elia Suleiman film is going to deliv­er, but pre­sum­ably when you were start­ing out this com­ic approach must have con­found­ed poten­tial financiers?

I was reject­ed non-stop when I was try­ing to set up my first fea­ture. At that time in the mid-’90s there weren’t a lot of Pales­tin­ian film­mak­ers per se, and the left­ies in the occi­den­tal film world were very patro­n­is­ing about Pales­tine. They want­ed to speak about it and not let you speak about it, so they were affront­ed by the com­e­dy in the script. They knew that Pales­tini­ans nev­er laughed, because they were far too busy being tor­tured and tor­ment­ed by the Israelis. This was not real­i­ty, so one French pro­duc­er was con­vinced I was a fake Pales­tin­ian. I’d been liv­ing in New York, so I was told, ​‘Go back to your Amer­i­ca!’ That’s the hypocrisy of the French left: they have all this anger towards Amer­i­ca, but, of course, they love it really.

So much art­house cin­e­ma presents the suf­fer­ings of the glob­al dis­pos­sessed for the delec­ta­tion of mid­dle-class audi­ences, yet your films are in a way more dis­arm­ing because their unex­pect­ed humour encour­ages you to engage with them.

In a way, those post-colo­nial atti­tudes are still with us, but per­haps in more sub­tle ways. It Must Be Heav­en was still turned down by sev­er­al fes­ti­vals, per­haps because they thought the Nazareth sec­tion was too short and maybe there wasn’t enough action. But my plea­sure is in sur­pris­ing the audi­ence every oth­er scene. It was grat­i­fy­ing that the response in France to the scenes in Paris was actu­al­ly very pos­i­tive. I thought I would get my wrists slapped for over-step­ping my place, but it seems as if they appre­ci­at­ed being made to ques­tion their self-image.

It’s quite a pro­found insight that by mak­ing your char­ac­ter silent, it some­how encour­ages us to lis­ten more intently.

Well, he has two, three words to say this time, though it’s almost that they’re non-infor­ma­tive. Actu­al­ly, I hate the sound of my voice in that scene, but, yes, this, to me, is what cin­e­ma should be. Max­imis­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of sound and image is like an eth­i­cal posi­tion. It takes time for me to write a film because I have to live, to observe, and to make each scene rich enough to be gen­er­ous to the view­er. It’s about open­ing up the space for the audi­ence to par­tic­i­pate, about giv­ing them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take plea­sure from the tableau pre­sent­ed to them, or per­haps to explore dif­fer­ent areas of the frame. It’s like vis­it­ing a gallery – some­times you look close-up, some­times from fur­ther back. Maybe that makes me sound like a failed painter, but I’m def­i­nite­ly not. It’s about mak­ing the read­ing of the film a demo­c­ra­t­ic moment.

When we see this gor­geous-look­ing, sophis­ti­cat­ed film shot in Paris and New York, it’s a reminder of what an extra­or­di­nary jour­ney you’ve tak­en since you were that kid grow­ing up in the back­streets of Nazareth. How do you make the con­nec­tion between then and now?

You know, I strug­gle with that myself. There are no answers, because in a way there are no facts. I didn’t see any films when I was grow­ing up, there were no fam­i­ly con­nec­tions to film. When peo­ple ask me these ques­tions I have to fic­tion­alise the answer, in a way. I was a school dropout. A street kid who became a bum. But a think­ing bum. I was read­ing, I’d start­ed to watch films, and it was all about try­ing to fig­ure out what I could be, how I could some­how express myself.

Maybe that’s how you explain the silence at the cen­tre of my films, because silent cin­e­ma is a foun­da­tion, a start­ing point. But Keaton, Tati, all those ref­er­ences, I only caught up with them after I start­ed mak­ing my own films. I’m now in a posi­tion of being a pro­found admir­er of them, but they weren’t ini­tial­ly an inspi­ra­tion. When I think back, rel­a­tives would always ask me whether I was going to study law or med­i­cine, and I told them film. At that point, I had no idea what a film school was or what you would do there. I guess the turn­ing point was when I start­ed to take that white lie a bit more seriously.

It Must Be Heav­en is released in UK cin­e­mas on 18 June. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.