Paradise Now - A Step Along the Road to Peace?

Hani Abu Assad, director of Oscar-niminated Paradise NowParadise Now, the Oscar-nominated film directed by Hany Abu Assad, is the first feature film to take on the theme of suicide bombers. It is a film that plays across a hugely emotional landscape which inevitably polarises people. For every terrorist there are victims, for every oppressed person, there are martyrs: it all depends on your viewpoint....

Khaled and Said, two young Palestinians, friends since childhood, have been selected for a mission as suicide bombers in Tel Aviv. For one night, they are permitted to visit their families in Nablus, to spend with those they love what is likely to be the last night of their young lives.  They tell no-one of their plans, so they don't really take their final leave of their relatives. The next morning, they are brought to the Israeli border. They carry the bombs concealed on their bodies.



The operation does not go as planned. Khaled and Said lose sight of one another. Now separated, they are forced to act independently, the "living bombs" have to face their fate alone and hold onto the courage of their convictions.

 Paradise Now - Suicide bombers strap explosives around their bodies

 Abu Assad's film has already prompted objections to its Oscar classification as an entry from “Palestine,” a nation state that does not even legally exist.

Abu Assad directs the action

Care needs to be exercised over drawing boundaries in this part of the world. Here, one nation state -  Israel - was founded on land formerly known as Palestine. Since then, there have been Arab-Israeli wars and Israel has “annexed” a lot of Palestinian land outside internationally agreed Israeli boundaries, which Israel now controls and where it has allowed some Israelis to settle.

   TERRORISM ERUPTS

After many years of Israeli occupation of these Arab lands, some Palestinians resorted to terrorism. It is little mentioned now in the West, but terror tactics are not exactly new here. When extreme Zionist groups wanted a Jewish homeland and Israel was created, terror tactics were used to intimidate whole Arab villages. The inhabitants of these villages were Palestinians. They fled their lands in the face of this intimidation and formed the basis of the Palestinian refugee populations in many neighbouring Arab countries, landless and stateless as well. And yes, feeling angry about their treatment. So are their displaced children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. All of them, discontented.

So this is a part of the world where uninformed criticism is not only unhelpful, but foolish as well.

These people have lived with oppression, suppression and discrimination for generations. This is the raw material which is the seedbed of Abu Assad's film.

 Hiam Abbas in Paradise Now

An exile himself, the director has lived in Holland, mainly, since 1981. He financed his film as a Dutch/French/German co-production, so its international credentials were part of the market strategy for the film, right from the beginning. There were no suicide bombings when the film began shooting in 2000, so was the politics that Palestinian terrorism is grounded in part of the framework? Abu Assad insists what he was seeking was a good cinematic story.

“I want to my film to be judged on solely cinematic grounds,” Abu Assad says. “Paradise Now is about friendship, and how the choices we make are influenced by the environment and circumstances around us. I used reality as the backdrop. I wanted to make a thriller, a genre film, but in a realistic context, in a real time and place, simultaneously telling an important story.”

The West Bank Palestinian town of nablus, where Paradise Now was filmed comes under Israeli attackPolitics though, can never be far away from a film subject like suicide bombings on which everyone must hold opinion of some kind, including presumably, the film's director.

“Personally, I am against violence. However, the film is more complex than my opinion: each character has his own opinion, and enters into conflict with himself and the others.”

He is being cautious here. It is surely not possible for a Palestinian not to have political views about the factors that brought suicide bombings into play as a political kamikaze weapon.

“My political point of view is clear,” the film's director maintains. “There is a nation whose borders are controlled by Israel. They are occupying our land, they are responsible for the people who live within those borders. Until the Palestinians have equal rights, these things will continue to happen, there will be 14 year-olds ready to become kamikazes.“Nablus - Palestinian men are marched away at gunpoint by Israeli forces

If you scratch a Palestinian, even one who is cosmopolitan and mixes easily, professionally and socially with Israelis, Arabs and Europeans, he will bleed Palestinian blood. It is part of the heritage the world has given every Palestinian. This has been long recognised by brother Arabs, who describe Palestinians as “happy people with black hearts.” No matter how placid the outside may seem, inside there is much unhappiness. Abu Assad handles this pragmatically. History cannot be forgotten, but it is history and Palestinians are shaping their lives and futures as best they can, with the materials they have been given.                                                              

                                                                                  MAFFIA-LIKE ORGANISATIONS

Arrested men of Nablus are lined upIn Abu Assad's case, the material in his hands may be a film, but he rebuffs claims from some quarters that what he shows is a one-sided picture failing to address, as one reporter put to him in Berlin, “the more negative aspects of Palestinian life, for instance, the Mafia-like running of the territory by fundamentalist organisations.”

The director's reaction was courteous, but immediate and final.

“When we become a free and independent nation, then I will speak about the unhealthy part of our society,“ Abu Assad responded.

So what was his motivation for making his film, remembering that at the turn of the millennium, when he started to film, there were no suicide attacks taking place at all?

   STORY, STORY, STORY

“Like every filmmaker, I am always looking for a story. Back then, I viewed the phenomenon as a story. This distance was supposed to prevent me from being swayed by the topicality of the situation and the fears and emotions associated with it, which might have resulted in a predictable film.”

No matter how much emotional distance he was able to give himself from his subject, the realities of life in Palestine were bound to intrude, as indeed they did when Palestinian suicide attacks began again in October 2000 with the second Intifada.

Three Israeli soldiers search an arrested man in the occupied West Bank town of Nablus“This turn of events was especially bad for the people there. I viewed this reality, however, as a drama in which the characters develop. I recounted this drama in the language of film. This distance was necessary to be able to comprehend the phenomenon of killing and dying at the same moment in which it was happening.”

The director and his crew were filming in a place where they got an exceptional view of the struggle that was going on. They were filming in the city of Nablus, a hotbed of resistance to Israeli occupation. Violence was taking place all around them and the city of Nablus came under siege from Israeli armed forces. It was clearly a very dangerous place for non-combatants to be. Why did he choose to stay there?

    STICKING CLOSE TO REALITY

“Because I wanted to shoot the film as a fictional story, but at the same time stay close to reality. That meant shooting the story on location where it is based – while the events recounted were happening,” Hany Abu Assad maintains.

The West Bank appeared to be the safest choice for locating at the time.

“Our first option was Gaza, but we quickly gave up because the city is now a big prison where entering and exiting are nearly impossible. At that time Israel was firing rockets at Gaza on a daily basis, but hadn't fired any at the West Bank for six months. Since the Israeli army was invading Nablus daily, we didn't think we had to worry about any especially dangerous rockets striking there. You don't see a rocket approaching. But you do see the Israeli tanks, and we would have had enough time to take cover.”

Events however were to prove otherwise and the director had to quickly reappraise the situation and had a change of mind.

   UNDER ROCKET ATTACK

In Nablus' al beik mosque the bodies of the Palestinian dead are lined up“Yes, because suddenly on the 20th day of shooting an Israeli rocket struck close by. My first reaction was cynical. I felt like the captain of a sinking ship. I'm too far away from port to turn back, so I have to keep going. Six German technicians left the set. I can't blame them. Life is more important than film. So we all left and shot instead in Nazareth.”

But even when siege conditions were not too bad, this was not the usual sort of location film crew might expect, over 70 of them, including Europeans who clearly had not been expecting to be shooting in what was effectively a war zone. The comforts they found were surprising, even to a Palestinian exile like Hany Abu Assad.

   NICE HOTEL

“We had a really nice hotel. I found it incredible how the Palestinians in Nablus were holding up under Israeli pressure. The children continued to go to school every day – only staying home on days when curfews or strikes were in effect. The stores were open, there were still weddings, people told jokes and laughed. At the same time, you could see signs of social decline. There was no police force, and militant groups robbed a bank. The West Bank was like the Wild West.”


Nablus has the narrow streets typical of any ancient Arab townSo wild in fact that stories began to emerge that the film makers were caught between two different militant groups who both laid claims to the shoot of a Palestinian film. As I pointed out earlier, the boundaries in this part of the world are not always as clear as you might think. Abu Assad continues his story.

“One faction wanted to stop the film from being shot. They considered it anti-Palestinian because it doesn't show the violence of the Israelis and the occupation. The other group agreed, but pleaded nonetheless for freedom of speech and backed us up, with weapons of course, which were fortunately never used.”

There are few secrets in an Arab village and for all its size Nablus is an Arab village, where everything is known, everything is discussed and people argue openly about what is good and what is bad about any situation under discussion. It is not possible for a 70-strong film crew to be discrete, so they would be the subject of intense speculation, but how much did people know about the film he was shooting?

   UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE

“All of the people in Nablus knew the screenplay from hearsay, and everyone had an opinion on it. It became the major topic of conversation. I even had to talk about my screenplay when I went to buy groceries. At the same time, we had to negotiate with the soldiers for every little thing, for example, to let an actor enter or leave the city.”

By night Nablus shows another face, despite the occupationAlmost all of his actors are Palestinians who live in Israel or like Hany Abu Assad, in Europe. His leading role is played by Lubna Azabal, who was born in Belgium. So how was the relationship between those Palestinians involved in the film and the Palestinians in Nablus, who unlike the crew, are never able to leave?

“They treated us very well, and we were welcomed everywhere we went,” the director says.

“They appreciated the fact that we wanted to get first-hand experience of the dangers they faced in their everyday lives. Once I went to buy a pair of shoes, and when the saleswoman found out who I was, she wanted to give me the shoes as a gift.”

Despite living as a European for the last 25 years, Abu Assad like any Palestinian has followed every twist and turn events back home have taken. If there could ever be a peace accord signed between Israelis and Palestinians, what, he was asked, did he think it would it look like?

   PRINCIPLE OF EQUALITY

“The only solution is the principle of equality between Palestinians and Israelis, as nations and as individuals. On this basis it would be possible to negotiate the details fairly quickly. Up until now, official representatives of Israel have not yet recognized a State of Palestine on an equal footing with Israel – since that necessarily means a division of the territory and its resources. They reject that idea as a surrender of the Jewish state and instead offer the Palestinians only human rights.”

Surely though, with Israel having stated quite openly that until the suicide attacks cease, there will be no compromises and Palestinians will not get their own state. How does Abu Assad view that?

“The suicide attacks are a consequence of oppression, which first has to stop. The Israelis forget that the occupation continued during the Oslo peace process,“ Abu Assad says.

Does he condemn suicide bombings?

   AN EXTREMIST REACTION

“Why? I am against killing people, and I want that to stop. But I do not condemn the suicide attackers. For me, it is a very human reaction to an extreme situation.”

This, you will recall, is a Palestinian talking. He may be unable to condemn the motives of the suicide bombers', but he wants to see the killing stop. This may not satisfy some Israelis, who have been very critical of his film and have even appealed to the Academy to have it withdrawn from the Oscars, One of his protagonists lost his only son to a suicide bombing on a bus, something that features in the very final scene of the film. No mangled bodies are seen though, no dead Israeli civilians.

There were good reasons for that, the director maintains, defending his decision. “The ending I chose is much more powerful, because we already know from the media what the images after the attack look like, but not the images before the attack.”

What most people throughout the world are trying to achieve - a happy, safe, secure family lifeThere were plans for the Israeli Film Fund to underwrite the distribution of the film in Israel, but as Paradise Now's profile has grown, through Oscar nomination for example, it has come under attack from a number of quarters within Israel, the country that has suffered from dozens of suicide bomber attacks. The film's director is keen to have his film seen within the country many Palestinians believe is their arch-enemy.

  DELIGHTED TO SCREEN FOR ISRAELIS

"I would be delighted to show Israelis the film, because for them the Palestinians are either invisible or terrorists. I am going to try to organize some screenings in the West Bank, in order to get a discussion going."

It would make absolute sense for the film to be seen by Israelis, many of whom are also unhappy at the treatment their country has accorded to Palestinians. It would be a vehicle to examine the issues that surround the terrorism that has been inflicted on Israeli people, because that terrorism is not an end in itself. It is a symptom of the very deep discontent of Palestinian people.

Who are these people who are willing to strike a blow for their fellow-countrymen and die themselves in striking it? One suicide bomber was a very successful Palestinian lawyer. She became a suicide bomber only after witnessing her father and bother fatally brutalised by Israeli soldiers.

A professional who lived by the law, finally felt obliged to abandon it and became a mass-murderess.

There's a too-easy tendency in the West to see such things in black and white terms and label the perpetrators of bombings as extremists or fanatics, people you could never have rational discussion with. It's never as simple as that and it is a mistake to reject dialogue – the very first step towards gaining mutual understanding.

If Abu Assad's film, through discussion alone, can achieve one further step along the road to a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it will have gained a prize that is far more tangible and valuable than an Oscar nomination, or any further accolade the Academy can bestow upon it. Meanwhile if the publicity helps it on the way, good luck to it.

 


 

WEBLINK

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