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| Cinema Now: An Interview with Paradise Now Director Hany Abu-Assad |
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| Written by Ilana Sichel | |||||
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In Other's Words  A month before the media-buzzing Palestinian film, Paradise Now opened to packed audiences in New York, I sat down with Director Hany Abu-Assad in a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park. Raised in Nazareth and educated in airplane engineering in Amsterdam, Abu-Assad returned to the Middle East at age 25 to work on Curfew, with Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi. Two years later, he went back to the Netherlands to work on his first feature film, The 14th Chick, before coming home yet again to make Nazareth 2000, Ford Transit, and his latest film, Paradise Now. Co-produced by a German and an Israeli, the film has been criticized by some for being too sympathetic to suicide bombers and others for not showing enough Israeli violence. Its very existence is remarkable given the Israeli and Palestinian violent threats against its crew and cast members. Paradise Now is the first feature-length fiction film about suicide bombers shot on location, in the West Bank. Already the winner of three prizes at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, including best European film and audience favorite, Paradise Now opened in Israeli theaters on November 10th and will screen in festivals throughout the Arab world. Before you run out to see it, read what Abu-Assad and I discussed about film, Palestine, The Sopranos, Jewish history, and more. Ilana Sichel: Where did your idea to make Paradise Now come from and in what context do you see it operating? Hany Abu-Assad: Where I grew up, in Israel, you have a Jewish State with a lot of non-Jews, and there is no other way to govern but to oppress them. And the non-Jews, in Israel and Palestine, because they’re not controlling the borders, are living under the state’s authority but don’t have equal rights, feel that they are being oppressed. Paradise Now comes from this conflict. It is about physical oppression. IS: When you started working on the film, what were your aspirations? What were you afraid of in the process? HAA: Well, I discovered it was very dangerous to make the film, with both the Israeli army and suspicious Palestinians. And as an artist, you are always afraid of not making the right decisions. You constantly have to ask yourself, “Why should I watch this? What is this adding to my knowledge, to my experience?” If nothing, why should I make it? I made Paradise Now because it’s a tragic situation that deserves to be filmed and I was very curious about allowing you to experience things that reality never will. This is what good films do. They let you go somewhere with somebody that reality would never allow. IS: What do you think is the role of fiction and film in the conflict? HAA: Fiction allows you, wherever you stand in this conflict, to experience things that you’ll never experience in reality. If I see a Jewish Israeli movie, I can understand more of the Israeli mentality. It allows me temporarily be part of that population. This is the role of fiction: to become somebody that you just can’t be, like, say, a Soprano. I love The Sopranos. IS: And what about film? HAA: I don’t know. The only thing I’m trying to do is to tell the story of my culture—my narrative, my history. I don’t think it can play a role now, but maybe in ten, 50 years. Maybe Paradise Now can be a small piece in the puzzle of history. It could move people, but it’s not forcing you to change your ideas. I want to allow you to just experience a moment of life with someone else. IS: It’s true; I was most struck by the film’s lack of dogmatism. It wasn’t advocating bombing, but there was a sense of inevitability about the narrative. It was strange, but part of me almost wanted Said to blow himself up. HAA: [laughs] What do you mean? IS: For him, as a person, it was clear that he really needed to do it. The momentum of the story was so strong that I was right there with him. HAA: Thank you. I consider this a compliment. In the beginning, Bero Beyer, my producer and co-writer said, “we have to make a film that will shock even us.” Shock us that we can understand this character. And that’s what we set out to do. IS: What were your thoughts about your portrayal of suicide bombing? HAA: Well before I started my research, I thought the bombers were politicized by religion, hate, and fundamentalism. But after even the first, very small amount, we were shocked by the human stories. The feeling of impotence from the daily humiliation is hardest for the sensitive people. When they face the daily humiliation, the fact that no one can protect them and they can’t protect themselves makes it difficult to face their communities. And they develop a kind of superhero image in their heads. And by killing themselves and others they are telling themselves, “I am not impotent, I am not a coward.” IS: What were the actors’ experiences in playing these parts? HAA: It was very difficult for them, especially because we wanted to shoot this in the real time and place. For instance, Ali Suliman, who played Khaled, was really shaking when he was giving his farewell speech in the actual place where suicide bombers record their goodbyes. It did not feel like a movie to any of us. He was not just playing confused. IS: Did you or the actors know anyone who’d been bombers? HAA: We didn’t, no. But we lived in Nablus for four months and the guys worked in the garage before they started acting because I wanted them to really become the characters, in the real place, on the real schedule. It was difficult for them. Each of us was very confused and shaken. IS: I think that comes across in the ambivalence of the film. It feels realistic but it’s shot on 35mm, which makes it feel artistically removed. What are your thoughts on the tension between its realism and art value? HAA: In the beginning, I thought we had to shoot it in documentary style. But when you think about it, you realize a documentary is only a temporary agreement between the audience and the shaking camera. 35 mm is closer to what you really see, with steady images and depth. In twenty years, we will experience today’s documentaries as ugly, disturbing films. So I decided that we have to go to a more classical medium with a less visible language, and one that has never been used to shoot in real time and place. IS: And isn’t that why people are scared of it? Most people don’t want to empathize with bombers in any way and certainly don’t want them to be humanized. HAA: An Israeli friend of mine says that the strongest thing you can do is humanize your enemy. When you are weak, you can’t afford to do so, but for us, he said, for Israelis, it is a sign of strength to humanize them and then you can actually win. And Israel today plays the role of victim too much, to the point where it starts looking and sounding unbelievable. There is absolutely a danger, and one that I was also subject to growing up in Israel, but there are so many others too. IS: Sounds like the identity crisis of Judaism today. We’re so used to being the victims, what do we do now that, in many places of the world, we’re in power? HAA: Judaism survived not because of power or states. Jews and Judaism survived because they invested in storytelling, in culture, in humanism. For centuries, Jews were the human conscience of the world. The Holocaust was a huge crime against this conscience, and a turning point. And now the additional tragedy is that the conscience of the world has become the same as everyone else—obsessed with the banalities of states, of power, of controlling others. And now we, the Palestinians, have become the new conscience. And it is our responsibility to maintain this new moral discourse of humanity.
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