It was one of those sit-up-and-take-notice moments. Amid the mutually assured tedium of the Golden Globes awards on Monday night, one winner said something wholly at odds with the bejeweled splendor of Hollywood’s Beverly Hilton hotel. Receiving the award for best foreign film, director Hany Abu-Assad said he hoped the prize would bring “a recognition that the Palestinians deserve their liberty and equality unconditionally”.
Brave words, particularly when the film in question is a portrait of two suicide bombers. Paradise Now, a winner at the Berlin and Toronto festivals, tells the story of 48 hours in the lives of two young men who grew up together, as they prepare for a suicide bombing mission. The film shows the mundanity of evil as the men have their hair cut, attend a final supper, record video statements to prepare the way for martyrdom and finally strap on the explosives. But things go awry after they are led to the border and the pair becomes separated.
Abu-Assad, who probably qualifies as the most surprised winner of the night, admits he got carried away with his Golden Globes moment. “I didn’t expect it,” he says, his loud, heavily accented English echoing through the empty coffee bar near his Los Angeles home. “You come with a $2m movie, it’s a subject that nobody wants to hear about. It was a joke. It was a joke that I was even nominated. Suddenly you hear your name. I stood there like I didn’t know exactly what to say. But when they called Palestine, it was like, wow. Palestine is not even a state yet, it’s a proposal. And here I am standing in front of the glamorous part of Hollywood representing a proposal.”
Two nights after the heady Globes ceremony, Abu-Assad has returned to reality, moving boxes into his new apartment in Los Angeles. After living in Holland for 20 years he has moved to Hollywood, tempted by a two-film contract. “Before the ‘celebration’ I just came here for two projects,” he says. “Now I’m stuck here.”
While he doesn’t regret his words at the celebration, they have given him pause for thought. “I believe I made my film artistically less important when I said the Palestinians need their liberty. But that was my feeling at that moment. I turned the film into a kind of political statement, which it is not. The film is an artistic point of view of that political issue. The politicians want to see it as black and white, good and evil, and art wants to see it as a human thing.”
The film’s main female character (Lubna Azabal) plays the role of questioner, arguing with one of the bombers about his mission. The other bomber is shown questioning the morality of his mission. “What happens afterwards?” a bomber asks one of the leaders of the unidentified group behind the bombings.
“Two angels will pick you up,” the man tells him.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Absolutely.”
Paradise Now’s human depiction of the bombers has generated both positive and negative reactions, although neither as harsh as Abu-Assad expected. For some, it does not treat the two characters with the respect suicide bombers should be afforded; for others it humanizes them, even glorifies them.
“They are human, like it or not,” says Abu-Assad. “It’s a human reaction. It’s not that these people are different genetically.”
As far as Abu-Assad is concerned, he is just doing what artists are supposed to do, coloring in the spaces between the black and white visions of politicians. “It’s not just what some politicians want us to believe — that it’s evil, that it comes from God. Bullshit. It’s a human reaction to a very complex situation. The film tries to let you experience this situation in a different way, from different points of view. This is why we make films, I think.”
Abu-Assad read transcripts of Israeli Army interrogations of suicide bombing suspects and spoke to people who knew other bombers while writing the script. He also spent six weeks working on the script at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Despite doubts, and the cancellation of a planned screening of the film at the Cambridge film festival last summer in the wake of the London bombings, Paradise Now has received a wide theatrical release, including the US. It will play at the Human Rights film festival in London in March before opening in the UK later in the year.
Paradise Now is the official Palestinian entry for the Oscars, a category that has a troubled relationship with the nascent state. In 2003, Divine Intervention by the Palestinian Director Elia Suleiman was barred from the Oscars on the grounds that “Palestine is not a state”. Hollywood, and Palestine, have moved on.
A European co-production made by a Palestinian director working with an Israeli producer, Paradise Now has the heft of Warner Bros behind its US release. Accordingly, it has been marketed as a taut thriller, with trailers emphasizing Lubna Azabal. “From the most unexpected place comes a bold new call for peace,” says the voiceover to the trailer, before concluding: “Sometimes the most courageous act is what you don’t do.”
A young 44-year-old, Abu-Assad is a combination of intensity and jollity, animated by politics and film in equal measure. The two feed on each other, his art fueled by his sense of struggle and oppression. And while the political animal in him may be unsatisfied with the result, the artist is thriving. “When you are the underdog in the fight, your weak position gives you the opportunity to fight on the side of beauty,” he says. “When you only have beauty to express yourself, to fight with, then you establish a feeling for beauty, for how you create from the ugly side of civilization. So the checkpoint can become a painting. This is your medium, this is your weapon. You have no other choice.”
He recognizes that artists thrive under oppression, but doesn’t think the Palestinians have yet arrived at a point where they need to worry about the dissipation of their creative energies: “There is always something going on in the liberation movement. It’s good to be from that side even if there are a lot of defeats. We have been fighting for our rights for more than 60 years and it’s a big failure up to this moment. But we’re still in a liberation movement which allows me as an artist to be at this level where you don’t immediately become corrupt.”
Paradise Now was shot mainly in Nablus in the summer of 2004, a decision prompted by the desire for vérité, but one that almost derailed the film. The crew worked amid nearby shootings, missile strikes and hostility from groups that thought the film was not sufficiently sympathetic to suicide bombers. One such group even kidnapped the film’s location manager, who was freed after a call to the then Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat. “Arafat has never been to the cinema but he helped us to release this guy,” Abu-Assad laughs. “I wanted to shoot in Nablus because I wanted to set the film in a real time and place,” he continues. “You think it’s going to work but when you are there it’s difficult to execute because you live under occupation. Before we could enter we had to sign a paper (agreeing) that if we are killed by the Israeli Army’s bullets, we are guilty. You are there like deer, they can kill you and it’s your fault.” The daily interruptions and the very present danger eventually led the crew to return to Nazareth, Abu— Assad’s home city, to finish filming.
Abu-Assad’s reality is laced not only with humor but with passion and anger at the plight of the Palestinian people. “I have a lot of pain from the Jewish state,” he says. “You can’t escape it. You have to think about the other side, the side that causes you the pain, then you start to understand it better.
